Three in four people in Chicago who have died from COVID-19 are Black or Latinx. This striking disparity is in part the result of longstanding racial inequities in healthcare quality and access, and necessitates an urgent and forceful response from our city’s leaders.

Chicago was one of the first cities in the nation to highlight these disparities. Under Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s leadership, the City (led by its Chief Equity Officer Candace Moore and its Deputy Mayor for Education and Human Services Sybil Madison) brought together West Side United, community leaders, and healthcare providers to form the Racial Equity Rapid Response (RERR) Team in mid-April. The RERR Team sought to: mobilize community- and data-driven rapid responses to address racial health disparities of the crisis; determine and implement direct interventions that flatten the COVID-19 mortality curve in Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities; and build a foundation for future racial health equity by rectifying historical institutional and systemic racism.

“We thought Civic Consulting Alliance was uniquely prepared to support the RERR Team’s efforts, given its experience standing up and managing RERR co-convener West Side United—itself a community-driven and health-focused collaborative—as well as numerous other cross-sector coalitions.”

—Candace Moore, Chief Equity Officer, City of Chicago

Civic Consulting Alliance helped to develop the RERR Team’s collaborative structure and framework, supported implementation of immediate mitigation strategies in high-need communities, and brought additional resources to the table to fulfill critical needs—including pro bono fellows and teams from Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and Slalom. As a result of these collaborative efforts, over the spring and the summer, the RERR Team achieved significant outcomes within key strategies across its four focus areas, described below.

Education

• Led a campaign to distribute information about COVID-19 and the importance of social distancing and testing, resulting in 60,000 door hangers and 65,000+ views on Facebook and Twitter
• Hosted 7 virtual and phone-in townhalls attended by more than 2,000 people in heavily-impacted communities to educate folks about COVID-19 and learn about community members’ greatest concerns

Prevention

• Partnered with 21 healthcare providers to proactively reach out to patients in communities that are most impacted by COVID-19, contacting approximately 75,000 patients. Of those who provided race/ethnicity information, 48% self-identified as Black and 40% self-identified as Latinx
• Facilitated collaboration between healthcare providers, which culminated in an unprecedented joint statement in mid-June, in which 40 institutions spoke out in a unified voice to declare racism a public health crisis and pledge collective action to improve health equity
• Produced a guide incorporating patient engagement data and practices from 10 healthcare providers to inform other cities about the RERR Provider Working Group’s approach to proactive patient engagement, as well as outcomes and lessons learned

Testing and Treatment

• Worked to ensure testing sites were in historically underserved communities, resulting in 8 testing sites in RERR Team target locations and mobile testing sites to making testing more accessible
• In light of highly-attended protests in May, produced a video series and fliers to encourage protestors to get tested for COVID-19; videos reached 50,000 viewers, contributed to a 13% increase in testing two weeks after initial protests, and helped prevent a spike in cases from the protests

Support and Services

• Secured financial support for those most impacted by COVID-19, including $3.1M in grants secured by partners, $155K in rent assistance, and cash assistance—including $120K for 120 individuals ineligible for federal stimulus dollars
• Between March and May, distributed critical resources to communities, including 130,000 masks and 13,000+ meals, reaching 8,000 households and more than 2,000 seniors
• Enabled public access to COVID-19 data via a Slalom dashboard that provides testing, case, and death rates by race / ethnicity and at the zip code-level—and which established Chicago as a national leader in data transparency
• Facilitated a data sharing agreement between academic organizations and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) in order to increase transparency and collaboration, and, in turn, improve RERR Team members’ ability to mitigate COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx communities

Given its success, the RERR Team is a model worth replicating in other cities struggling to address inequitable health outcomes—including and beyond COVID-19—and the systemic issues that underpin them. Specifically, the RERR Team demonstrated the value of:

• Bringing together communities and forming coalitions between government agencies, health providers, and community organizations;
• Identifying needs and disparities by gathering community insight, and advocating for resources; and
• Championing reliable data and information, and promoting healthy behavior.

While the RERR Team’s achievements thus far are critical, COVID-19 continues to have a dramatically disparate impact on Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities, and our work is far from done. In the months ahead, Civic Consulting Alliance will continue to collaborate with the City and West Side United to amplify priority racial health equity initiatives. As announced in mid-September, racial equity will be a focal point of the CDPH’s “Healthy Chicago 2025” strategic plan. At the same time, we will continue working with the members of the RERR Team’s healthcare provider working group to fulfill the commitments they outlined in their joint statement and to hold themselves accountable for promoting racial equity in healthcare. With COVID-19 an ongoing challenge, it is essential that we continue to center racial equity in all our efforts to address the pandemic in order to save lives and alleviate further harm to Black and Latinx communities. Moreover, we must carry our actions and lessons learned past the pandemic to work towards a more just and equitable future, where race and ethnicity are not determinants of health.

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