**Forthcoming in Progress in Community Health Partnerships (PCHP)19.2. All rights reserved.**
ABSTRACT
Background: Rural communities experience increased barriers to vaccination and have limited resources to combat the COVID-19 pandemic compared to their urban counterparts. Community-based strategies to improve access, encourage uptake and compliance, and reduce COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy are essential to reduce disparities, illness, and death in rural populations.
Objectives: The aim of our project was to develop a long-lasting partnership with a rural community health system in upstate New York to improve COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
Methods: The collaboration designed, implemented, and evaluated culturally appropriate behavioral messaging mapped to the Health Belief Model.
Lessons Learned: The community-university partnership was successful because of a bidirectional exchange of information, a strong foundation of trust, equitable involvement of all partners in all phases, and community empowerment and ownership of the process and the materials.
Conclusions: This project highlighted the importance of collaborating with community partners to create unique, culturally appropriate materials for rural audiences.