ISABELA CITY, Basilan, Jan. 10 (PIA) – The HAPIsabela LGBTQIA+ Council in Isabela City will push for COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Isabela City starting this month to raise awareness of the unvaccinated individuals on COVID-19 vaccines and encourage them get their COVID-19 jabs.

The HAPIsabela LGBTQIA+ Council is a newly organize group of LGBTQIA+ individuals in Isabela City committed to be more resilient, pro-active, innovative, vibrant and competitive individual of the society. The council firmly follows its goals for Service, Support and Supplement to be catalyst for betterment of the community.

Recently, the Y-PEER Pilipinas together with Department of Health (DOH), National Youth Commission (NYC) and UNICEF had a Call for Proposal: #KabayanihanYouthChallenge2022 designed to empower and facilitate timely, creative, and innovative youth actions that focus on local and community-driven solutions to increase access to immunization services among priority populations and promote COVID-19 preventive actions. This was open to different youth organizations and youth serving organizations across the country with unique idea to boost the number of vaccinated individuals within their locality through creative projects.

The HAPIsabela LGBTQIA+ Council was chosen as one (1) of the Top Ten Partner Grantees for #KabayanihanYouthChallenge2022 that will be implemented among the areas of Malamawi Island for 4 months.

Furthermore, Khidzmar J. Adam, President of HAPIsabela LGBTQIA+ Council added that the main goal of the project is to conduct house-to-house advocacy campaign to prevent misinformation and disinformation among locals and target 1,500 unvaccinated individuals to encourage them to get vaccinated through a referral system in collaboration with the local government unit, City Health Office, Civil Society Organizations and other line agencies.

As start of the project, the council will  capacitate IP youth volunteers who will be armed with enough knowledge and information to conduct house-to-house advocacy campaign on COVID-19 vaccination. These information volunteers are also expected to be trained as communicators, gather data of unvaccinated individuals to be referred to the City Health Office or concerned agencies, and establish fruitful rapport within their community.

The council will also conduct different activities as part of the project implementation to include Capacity Building to the thirty (30) IP youth volunteers, Stakeholders Forum, Radio Advocacy and Distribution of IEC Materials like tarpaulins and flyers.

“We are looking forward to a positive result of this project and we really hope that this will contribute to the  COVID-19 demand generation efforts of the city government of Isabela”, Tumalon stressed.(NBE/NDR-PIA Basilan)