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Connecting Communities

"Once I was going in and treating kids for hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol, I thought, I can’t do treatment anymore – I need to do prevention."

Anastasia McGee, director of community nutrition for the Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion (CPHP) Program, speaks passionately about her decision to move from the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago to the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative of the Great Cities Institute and the College of Nursing. “Once I was going in and treating kids for hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol, I thought, I can’t do treatment anymore – I need to do prevention.”

Under the leadership of Dr. Cynthia “Cee” Barnes-Boyd, Director of the Neighborhoods Initiative and Assistant Dean for Community Health in the College of Nursing, CPHP started 3 years ago with one physician and McGee as dietician. Today there are six dieticians and a staff of five community workers housed within the university, with growing opportunity for more positions.

According to Barnes-Boyd, “The Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion exemplifies the qualities of one of our most important goals – excellence in community engagement. Under this initiative, we develop meaningful partnerships that literally change lives. From the perspective of the university and its various colleges, CPHP sustains a venue through which faculty and students can learn, apply knowledge and experience the personal satisfaction that comes with seeing an immediate outcome for one’s efforts.”

“One of our main accomplishments with this program,” explains McGee, “is building partnerships within the community, within the university, and thereby spreading messages of healthy eating and healthy lifestyle to the individual organizations with whom we partner as well as the actual individuals we teach.”

These partnerships have blossomed so that in the last three years, CPHP has logged more than 500,000 direct contacts within the communities they serve – low-income, food stamp eligible individuals who reside in the greater metropolitan Chicago-area. CPHP personnel provide high-quality, age, gender, and ethnically-specific nutrition education to these communities in a variety of venues ranging from public grade school classrooms to the waiting rooms of Mile Square Health Center.

A most unusual program in its third successful year involves reaching the community through salons and barbershops. CPHP staff visit six salons each month to train the owners and staff in the basics of healthy eating. They conduct cooking and activity demonstrations and leave educational materials alongside the gossip magazines. “Because we’ve trained some of the employees at the sites,” says McGee, “we’re hoping it might change the shop talk and orient it to healthy behaviors.”

It is all about reaching people where they live and work and giving health education integrated with everyday lives.