LINC, Morning Star clinic partners bid bittersweet goodbye to Missouri National Guard

Members of the Missouri National Guard lead the line as LINC staff serves lunch at a celebration lunch June 15 at Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church’s Youth and Family Life Center.

Just like the entire vaccination mission itself, the send-off party for the Missouri National Guard was overwhelming.

More than 100 people gathered on the Guard’s last day, June 15, to celebrate the work they did with a host of community partners to deliver more than 30,000 Covid-19 vaccines — most of them with LINC at the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church’s community center, serving underserved and vulnerable neighborhoods of east Kansas City.

“I didn’t expect such a big event,” said Sgt. First Class Mitch Mason of the Missouri Army National Guard. But nor did he expect “so many resources from all around the Kansas City area” to shape such a life-saving mission when the guard was deployed to Kansas City in late January.

Many members of the different partners came to the celebration luncheon — Morning Star’s staff, LINC, Kansas City Fire Department Chief Donna Lake and paramedics, Church of Scientology volunteers, Kansas City Police Department officials, school partners and the Truman Medical Centers team that initially launched the Morning Star vaccination clinic.

“I’d never been around something like that before,” Mason said. “It’s a team that got built. So many selfless people.”

One of the luncheon’s visitors was Jim Nunnelly, a community leader and retired public health administrator who helped rally the community — especially the predominantly Black neighborhoods that had suffered disproportionately from the pandemic — to get vaccinated.

He gestured back to Morning Star’s big room, set up for a party, that had served as the main vaccination center.

“What happened here,” he said, “is the best thing in the history of public health.”

LINC Executive Vice President Janet Miles-Bartee addressed the crowd at what she said was “a bittersweet moment.”

The men and women of the Guard “made this an amazing experience,” she said. “They have become our family and our friends.”

Many people were recognized for their contributions, including the Morning Star staff that “made it happen . . . whatever we asked them for,” Miles-Bartee said.

And the Kansas City Fire Department, which sent paramedics to the clinic to help increase its capacity as the number of daily vaccinations peaked at 400 to 500 a day in March.

There were the Church of Scientology volunteers, of whom Miles-Bartee said, “I’ve never seen a group of people work so hard.”

Kansas City Police Major Kari Thompson was there as part of the police support that came from the East Patrol Division station across the street. Center School District Superintendent Yolanda Cargile was there. Cargile and Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Mark Bedell got their vaccines at Morning Star, being videoed as they did so to help encourage more people to get their shots.

The Truman Medical Centers’ vaccination team returned to celebrate. TMC had worked with Morning Star to set up the church’s community center as a vaccination site. And it gave Morning Star Pastor Rev. John Modest Miles the idea to team up with LINC — Janet Miles-Bartee is his daughter — and get Gov. Mike Parson to send in the National Guard to carry the mission on.

While the members of the National Guard came from all over Missouri, many of them will not be too far away. Like family, they may be dropping in from time to time — including Mason.

Mason figures he and his wife and two boys will be back on a Sunday morning soon, coming down from their home about an hour away in Savannah, Mo.

“I want to come see Pastor preach,” he said.

Members of Truman Medical Centers’ team pose with LINC Executive Vice President Janet Miles-Bartee with posters tallying some of the services distributed at Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church.