(ambient music) - [Narrator] NPT Reports: Aging Matters.

- [Narrator] Rarely have so many Tennesseans been so happy to get a jab in the arm.

A vaccination shown to prevent the deadly COVID-19 virus.

People like 87-year-old Bernadeen Fleming, are making big plans to live normal again.

- Hello there!

- Hi!

- How're you?

- Oh, don't you look pretty in all your red?

- Oh, thank you.

Just beautiful.

- Now I'm not a club hanger-outer (laughing) or anything, but I got, I have to, I must get out of the house.

That's a must.

(laughing) I don't care how I get out, but I must get out.

- [Narrator] Her daughter, Allyson, made all the arrangements for Bernardeen to be on the schedule when Nashville Health Department offered COVID vaccinations to people 75 and older.

- I was gonna make sure that at some point she was getting this vaccine.

(laughs) (cheering) - [Allyson] I have some friends that have said to me that they weren't gonna get it, that they think it's some kind of hoax or something.

If we could educate our communities of color, share with them the safetiness of the vaccine, I think if you spread the word I think it would help a lot.

- How are you today?

- I'm good, how about you?

- Good.

- In the communities that have a difficult time getting the resources or getting the help, they also have fears.

And to get in there and say, hey, we're working this together, will really help with them.

And being an immigrant myself, I understand how those communities kind of work from the beginning to the end, you know?

And it's building trust.

(guitar music) - We are doing this because we had a lot of calls of our community wanted to know if it was good for them to have the vaccine.

And they feel comfortable for us to come here where our space, where we speak Spanish and they know and they trust what we say and what we advertise in our media.

- [Narrator] Monica Reyna, is director of Hispanic Family Foundation in Nashville.

A non-profit that assists the large and growing Hispanic population in middle Tennessee.

- Once we learned about the vaccine, we wanted to get it because it was a way to help prevent the spread any longer and I'm looking forward to just hopefully next year, getting back to what feels like normal.

Being able to hang out with family and friends, which I, that's a part that has been missing since the pandemic happened.