PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A restaurant workers' volunteer group is helping hundreds of people in the industry get their vaccinations this coming week.
Save Philly Restaurants Coalition is a nonprofit organized by HipCityVeg owner Nicole Marquis. She said it started as a group that helped industry workers get tested. Now, they're helping workers get access to vaccinations.
While restaurant workers, who are in the 1b group, are eligible to get vaccinated, Marquis said it's been difficult for them to do so.
"There are tens of thousands of restaurant workers in Philadelphia. Philadelphia has about 6,000 restaurants. Our coalition is about 300 restaurants right now. So there is still a lot of work to do and outreach to get restaurant workers throughout the city vaccinated," she said.
"Many of our workers are still confused and a little hesitant, in part because getting appointments is still so time-consuming and stressful."
Marquis said her organization spent the past few weeks sending out a pre-registration form to all of the members in their coalition.
"They've worked throughout the past few weeks to get their employees signed up, making sure they've registered properly, had all the information and we organized it and centralized it with Centennial Pharmacy," she detailed.
Marquis said that while the city steps up its vaccination efforts, they may scale down theirs. In the meantime, the coalition has registered about 900 people to get their first vaccine shots on Monday.
"So this is a huge step for restaurants reopening and welcoming people back to the city," she enthused.
As for how long their partnership with Centennial will continue, she said they're not entirely sure of an end date.
"We hope that this just continues to get easier and easier for everyone so that we don't have to do it," she said, "and it looks like that's what happening here in the city so we'll see."