After a Sunday service at the Church of God Christian Life Center in Dorchester, parishioners trickled into a pop-up clinic in the back room, where a nurse from Boston Medical Center prepared a dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine for Irlande Aime, who fidgeted nervously in a folding chair. The 34-year-old Dorchester resident…

It was a slow morning at a recent COVID vaccine clinic in Morrisville, VT. For the first two hours it was open, no one got a shot. The clinic, organized by the nonprofit Capstone Community Action, advertised free child care and transportation, hoping to make it easier to access. But that’s not what ultimately brought…

Lately, Elise Taylor is logging 10,000 steps a day, a lot of them on hills and up to front doors in Waterbury, CT to ask if residents are interested in taking the COVID-19 vaccine. On an overcast Friday in July, most knocks go unanswered. But when she sees a sign of life, a woman comes…

When Donna Jay was just five years old, she says a doctor told her parents that she had to leave home and live in an institution. “The doctor said, ‘You can’t take care of her. She’s not going to be able to walk, talk, read. Or anything.’ So, they said: ‘Okay,’” Jay recalled. She ended…

Debra and Paul McAlenney were at their home in Simsbury on a recent Tuesday morning watching their 5-year-old grandson, Hudson, while his parents worked. Hudson spends a couple of days during the week with his grandparents, or as he refers to them, Nana and Bacon. “Paul was sitting across the living room from us and…

When Erika Hoffman-Kiess first heard about people applauding for frontline workers in big cities, she didn’t think that would work so well in her town of Thetford, Vt. “There are some places in Vermont where you can go outside your door and bang a pot and pan and nothing’s going to happen because nobody hears…

Early last year, as the coronavirus threat spread, a 9-year-old named Miles turned into a raging boy his parents did not recognize. The family pediatrician referred Miles to a therapist. His mom, Emily Johnson, says her son needed help right away, but the earliest appointment was one to two months away. Three weeks after seeing…