Community leaders provide important safety nets for vulnerable and marginalized populations in Puerto Rico. Confronted by colonialism, government and institutional failures, austerity, and natural phenomena, and political disasters, these individuals take outsized and often volunteer roles to support groups that are disproportionately impacted by these issues.
Science can play a critical role in leaders’ ability to meet their communities needs and priorities, from preventing mosquito-borne diseases, to promoting mental health, to creating evacuation plans for coastal zones. However, they don’t always have access to scientific resources that can help them meet the needs and priorities of their people.
Aquí Nos Cuidamos’ community engagement leaders
Creation of Aquí Nos Cuidamos
To provide people in Puerto Rico with timely, accurate, culturally relevant and engaging science information to promote the health and wellbeing of communities, in 2020 the nonprofit organization Ciencia Puerto Rico (CienciaPR) created Aquí Nos Cuidamos, which translates to “here we take care of each other”. This project builds on CienciaPR’s almost two decades of experience putting science in service of Puerto Rico through culturally relevant science communication, public engagement, and education, and fostering the civic participation of the Puerto Rican scientific community.
Two core components
Aquí Nos Cuidamos has two core components: a multimedia collection of educational materials, and a community engagement program.
Multimedia materials
The multimedia collection includes five public service campaigns about: prevention and vaccination against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases; mental health; and other topics that feature videos in Spanish and sign language, images, audios, and guides.
Community ambassadors
The engagement component features a community ambassador program which has supported 10 Puerto Rican leaders in their prevention efforts, with funding, communications and graphic design help, and workshops. Aquí Nos Cuidamos’ community engagement has also included listening sessions, conversations, public workshops, and WhatsApp chats to gather input and rapid coordination with leaders and representatives of marginalized communities.
Informed by Puerto Rican Culture and realities
The content and strategies of Aquí Nos Cuidamos are closely informed by Puerto Rican culture and realities, not just from biomedical and health research, but also using relevant knowledge from the social sciences—including risk communication. For us, it was particularly important to ensure that Aquí Nos Cuidamos could enable people to assess and navigate COVID-19 in their own context. Below we highlight a few examples of how Aquí Nos Cuidamos incorporated risk communication strategies.
Physical, not social distance
First, is the name of one of our campaigns, “Distancia física, no social” (Physical, not social distancing). Puerto Ricans are gregarious, making the ubiquitous pandemic recommendation of social distancing harder to practice, because it goes against our customs and way of being. Recognizing this key cultural nuance and the importance of social ties for people’s wellbeing, our campaign emphasized that physical (not social) distancing combined with other science-based strategies (e.g., meeting outside, improving ventilation, masking) could reduce the risk of COVID-19 while preserving important social connections.
Vaccination messaging
Second, is our messaging around vaccination. Our COVID-19 vaccination campaign “Vacúnate, por ti y por mí” (Get vaccinated, for you and for me) was careful to recognize the dynamic nature of the pandemic and limitations of vaccination. Our messaging underscored the importance of continued mask-wearing and other measures to prevent coronavirus infections. This recognized that the goal of COVID-19 vaccines has always been to decrease the risk of severe disease and death, not infection. This contrasts with the almost single-minded approach taken by the Biden Administration in the United States and the Puerto Rican government to present vaccination as a silver bullet to end the pandemic, which led to premature triumphalism and undermined the credibility of efforts that followed.
Empowering community ambassadors
Finally, we enhanced the capacity of our ambassadors to convey risk to their own communities by providing them with our multimedia toolkit, workshops on how to use it for their own educational efforts, and rapid consultation via phone or WhatsApp to answer science-related COVID-19 questions and support their risk know-how. Once, one of our community ambassadors was hosting a bingo for her community—she wanted to provide them with an opportunity to connect with each other but was concerned about a COVID-19 outbreak. She reached out to one of us (Mónica I. Feliú Mójer) via WhatsApp and asked what she could do to minimize COVID-19 risk. They were already planning to require mask wearing and provide hand sanitizer. Mónica recommended doing the event outside, or improving ventilation by opening windows and doors, and having physically distanced seating.
Engaging specific communities: deaf people
We hosted a couple of Q&A sessions exclusively for Deaf people, a community that faces chronic health and informational disparities that were exacerbated during the pandemic. On several occasions, community ambassadors have underscored the value of having access to reliable and accessible science-based information to learn from and share through Aquí Nos Cuidamos. Some even have said that the project helped them overcome their hesitancy to get vaccinated.
Having an impact
Aquí Nos Cuidamos has continued adding content to its multimedia collection and broadening its reach in response to the evolving nature of the pandemic and the realities of communities in Puerto Rico. For example, in 2022 in response to community input, we created guides and offered workshops to help them understand and manage mis- and disinformation. In March 2023, we launched a new campaign, called “La prevención es la clave” (Prevention is key). The campaign reinforces familiar methods such as mask wearing, hand washing, and vaccination, while contextualizing them to the current state of the pandemic. It also recognizes the constant risk of public health emergencies and inadequate health systems in Puerto Rico, promoting self-care, preventive medicine, and good water management, among other prevention methods, and how people can practice them routinely.
To date, Aquí Nos Cuidamos contains more than 250 multimedia assets available for free at www.aquinoscuidamos.org. The website has been accessed by more than 90,000 people from more than 100 countries, many of them Spanish-speaking, since it launched in February 2021. Overall, we estimate that Aquí Nos Cuidamos has reached more than 250,000 people in Puerto Rico alone. Aquí Nos Cuidamos has garnered international recognition, like being named 2021 Breakthrough of the Year in Science Engagement by Falling Walls (Berlin, Germany) and selected for the Ibero-American Design Biennial (Madrid, Spain). It has received the endorsement of the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, the Puerto Rico Department of Health, and the Puerto Rico Community Engagement Alliance (PR CEAL), among other entities.
By applying risk communication strategies, Aquí Nos Cuidamos has enhanced risk know-how amongst marginalized communities in Puerto Rico. Specifically, the project has provided individuals and organizations with a one-stop place to find reliable, accessible, culturally relevant, science-based information to prevent COVID-19. Through community engagement, we have created opportunities for leaders and individuals from marginalized groups to ask questions about COVID-19 risks and learn about actions they could take to minimize them. Conversely, this engagement with communities has provided our team with valuable opportunities to learn, practice reflexivity, and constantly develop the project to better serve their needs and priorities. In conclusion, Aquí Nos Cuidamos is an example of how risk and other evidence-based communication strategies can be leveraged to enhance risk know-how amongst marginalized communities and ultimately promote health equity.
About Ciencia Puerto Rico
Ciencia Puerto Rico is a global community of over 15,000 scientists, students, educators, and allies dedicated to empowering individuals and society through the application of science. Through various programs, they promote civic engagement, democratise scientific knowledge, transform science education and professional development, and utilise science for the benefit of Puerto Rico and beyond.
