Actor Sean Penn’s nonprofit, which has been central to operating vaccination and testing sites in Los Angeles, has launched an awareness campaign aimed at increasing inoculations in communities of color hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.

CORE’s initiative, called It’s Time Los Angeles, arrives amid continued calls to prioritize equity in the vaccine rollout even as data show that Black and brown communities continue to lag behind in access.

For its campaign, CORE tapped culturally and linguistically competent leaders and organizations to get the word out on the importance of vaccination to the areas they serve, nonprofit co-founder and CEO Ann Lee said.

Communities “survive crises, over and over and over again. They’re the warriors that figure things out,” Lee said. “If you tap into that, and leverage and harness that incredible wealth of knowledge … and the work they do every day, and take it to scale, that’s what’s going to [bring] change.”

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