IBEC & AIHA Team Up To Encourage Business Owners To Commit To C.A.R.E.

The Integrated Bioscience and Built Environment Consortium (IBEC) & The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) have teamed up to raise awareness and knowledge about keeping buildings and communities safe from airborne infection transmission.

The initiative encourages businesses to pledge their commitment to C.A.R.E. for the health and well-being of their employees, clients, and customers.

C.A.R.E. is an acronym that reflects the principles of Community, Awareness, Responsibility, and Equity. As such, the idea is to deliver clear science-based messaging that reflects the commitment to public health across the communities where we all work and live.

Given that a primary transmission route for COVID-19 is airborne, medical mitigation strategies MUST complement environmental control solutions to reduce the risk of transmission.

The Commit to C.A.R.E. Pledge was developed by global experts, scientists, and researchers guided by the current peer-reviewed science and decades of lessons learned from risk prevention of other highly contagious airborne diseases like tuberculosis and measles.

IBEC & AIHA know that vaccination is one fundamental way to reduce the transmission and severity of COVID-19. However, they also believe there are other steps organizations should take to mitigate its spread and protect what matters most — people.

Commit to C.A.R.E. is a public awareness campaign with a mission to:

• Debunk myths about the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
• Make the complexities of the science easier to understand through various engaging multimedia tools.
• Encourage businesses to pledge their commitment to C.A.R.E. for the health and well-being of their employees, clients, and customers.

This campaign will promote and disseminate a variety of free resources (such as micro-training videos, checklists, web tools) for businesses to safeguard their employees and demonstrate their commitment to the communities in which they reside.

All tools developed under this project have been created with the needs of a nonscientific / non-medical audience in mind – people running businesses.

They are designed to empower accountability and responsibility and intended to facilitate everyone’s fair and equitable access to information.

“One of the most important missions of the Commit To C.A.R.E. pledge is increasing science-based awareness on ways to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases.” Says Ken Martinez, Chief Science Officer and Board founding member of IBEC. “Vaccination is crucial, however, there are many other ways to protect ourselves and others from COVID-19 and other airborne infections.”

Jayne Morrow, President, CEO, and Board founding member and IBEC added. “The Commit to C.A.R.E. pledge was designed for organizations and the workers that work for them.” when asked who can pledge to C.A.R.E. “The goal of the Commit to C.A.R.E. pledge is to drive the commitment from the leadership level down to the individual level.”

Help IBEC & AIHA by spreading the word about this important pledge by doing any of the following:

• ENDORSE: Provide us with your organization’s logo to add to the CommitToCARE.org website and communications materials. That’s it. Having your endorsement will influence others to Commit to C.A.R.E.
• ENDORSE and SHARE: This option is a combination of #1 above and your organization’s commitment to share information about this program with your members, colleagues, etc. If you agree to this, we will send you a media toolkit with sample newsletter articles, social media posts, and artwork for you to add to your website and correspondence.
• ENDORSE, SHARE and LEAD: This is a combination of #2 above, plus your organization’s commitment to appoint a liaison to help reach out to other audiences.

Commit to C.A.R.E. was developed in 2021 by the AIHA and IBEC, under a cooperative grant agreement funded in part by a CDC/NIOSH grant.

Join us in Committing To C.A.R.E. and keeping our organizations, buildings, and communities safe today!