DES MOINES, Iowa — A new program is promising to offer more help to immigrants and refugees when they come to Iowa.
It's called the Refugee and Immigrant Vaccine Alliance, and they're helping people through a website. It was started by multiple immigrant nonprofit organizations and refugee groups.
Cesar Marquez, the community engagement coordinator with EMBARC, one of the founding organizations of RIVA, said the purpose of the website is to have important information available to refugees and immigrants in their native languages.
"It is important because we have seen that there have been a lot of cultural barriers as well as language barriers and a lot of misinformation going around," Marquez said.
The idea for the website came after COVID-19 hit. Marquez said that's when it became evident that people who did not speak English, did not know where to get tested or about other resources.
Marquez and he and the other organizations are hoping the website changes that.
"A central location people can access each other and collaborate," Marquez said.
He noted for the site to be successful in helping more people, other culturally specific organizations should partner and post any information they want on it.
"There's going to be a login code over on our website, so any organization that is working with us we going to have some sort of sign-up for those organizations and be able to..they could post information as well," Marquez said.
So far at least 10 organizations have signed up to partner with RIVA and there are 14 different languages on the website.
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