Three Years of Service: SCHA’s Support for Pritzker Students’ Community Health Initiatives
By Victoria Ogunniyi
The Southside Community Health Advocates (SCHA) program, launched in 2022 by a group of Pritzker students through an Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) grant, was created with a single goal: to empower medical students to meaningfully engage with the communities they aim to serve. Over the past four years, SCHA has supported more than 20 Pritzker students and their community partners in doing exactly that. From delivering medical education to building new health programs, these student-led initiatives have made a tangible impact on the communities they were designed to support. The projects below represent a selection of the work carried out during the final years of the grant.
2023-2024 Cohort
Students: Alexa Canning and Emily Guernsey
Community Partner: UChicago Medicine Emergency Medicine Department
Project Area: Patient Comfort
Project: Alexa and Emily partnered with the UChicago Medicine Emergency Medicine Department. With Alexa’s interest in emergency medicine and Emily’s interest in trauma-informed care, they worked with Dr. Abdullah Pratt to improve the ED consult room, the space where families are told that their loved ones passed away. In the high traffic ED, upkeep of the consult room had fallen behind. Emily and Alexa worked in consultation with Spiritual Care and the Violence Recovery program to come up with a new design that showed appropriate respect for the seriousness of the conversations occurring there, painting the room a soothing blue and adding more comfortable furniture. They are working with a local high school to display student artwork in the room, reflecting that the consult room is a space for the community. Alexa and Emily hope that the room offers some small comfort during families’ hardest moments.
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Students: Kiara Revels and Aditya Jhaveri
Community Partner: Chicago South Side Birth Center and Chicago Volunteer Doulas
Project Area: Reproductive Health
Project: Kiara and Aditya spent this past year partnering with the Chicago South Side Birth Center and Chicago Volunteer Doulas. With Kiara’s and Aditya’s interest in birth justice, improving patient education, and reforming reproductive care, they worked with Dr. Sonia Oyola and Dr. Ann Borders to collaborate on and enhance community health education related to birth. Working with the Chicago South Side Birth Center, they created a series of Wellness Walks in Washington Park. Each week the walk highlighted a different topic that included preventative medicine, nutrition, preeclampsia, mindfulness, and more to engage community members in meaningful discussions. Kiara and Aditya also worked with Chicago Volunteer Doulas to create a zine focused on their Peer Doula Program. The zine provided information about reducing the harm of incarceration on families caused by separation through Peer Doulas who support their pregnant peers who are incarcerated during the challenging prenatal and postpartum experience in prison.
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Students: Janelle Herring and Ashley Russell
Community Partner: Maria Shelter
Project Area: Women’s Health
Project: Janelle and Ashley spent the year partnering with Maria Shelter, a 50-bed residential homeless shelter for women and children on the South Side of Chicago. Through their work with Maria Clinic, which is the weekly student-run free clinic offered onsite at Maria Shelter, they noticed that the population of the shelter was beginning to shift to an older demographic of women. With these changes, came more questions and concerns related to menopause and the general health changes that women can experience while aging. Informed by this, Janelle and Ashley participated in the annual Maria Shelter Englewood Health Fair, with a booth for menopause awareness. Attendees of the fair were engaged in conversations to address their personal concerns related to menopause, alongside being provided with informational packets to promote long term educational gain. To address the many physical changes that can occur in menopause, attendees were also provided gift bags with items that have been shown to alleviate or soothe some of the common symptoms seen in menopause. Through this intervention, Janelle and Ashley learned the power of personal conversations as an educational tool to address health concerns.
2025-2026 Cohort
Students: Ethan Salter and Sophia Salter
Community Partner: Community Cookies
Project Area: Food Insecurity
Project: Ethan and Sophia spent the past year building their organization, Community Cookies, to bridge the gap between the medical campus and the surrounding neighborhood. Drawing on Ethan’s background in street medicine and Sophia’s dedication to addressing food insecurity and social wellness, the duo launched this initiative to support vulnerable populations through the simple, joyful act of sharing homemade treats. The project operates to serve two needs: hosting interactive baking sessions that allow medical students to decompress and build community with one another, while specifically directing their donations to those in need, such as children in the local foster care system. What began as a small pilot has grown into a series of fun events where students learn culinary skills while addressing a tangible community need. Looking ahead, Community Cookies aims to expand its reach by partnering with more local youth advocacy groups and increasing the frequency of their Bake & Donate sessions to ensure a consistent impact on the lives of Chicago’s foster youth.
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Students: Zaynab Al-Rashed, Isaiah Osazuwa, and Stanton Greenstone
Community Partner: Project H.O.O.D
Project Area: Community Wellness
Project: Zaynab, Isaiah, and Stanton (MS4), in collaboration with Southside Free Clinic (SSFC) leadership, have spent the past several months organizing a focus group in partnership with Project H.O.O.D. This initiative reflects SSFC’s commitment to tailoring its services, resources, and outreach to the needs of the communities it serves—while also amplifying existing local organizations and fostering deeper conversations around wellness, mental health, and healthcare access. Through ongoing community-engaged research and dialogue, the team aims to enhance healthcare accessibility and adapt clinic operations to better serve the South Side community. Now entering its fourth year, SSFC continues to provide care to the Woodlawn, Englewood, and Hyde Park neighborhoods out of New Beginnings Church, offering walk-in clinical services, blood pressure and glucose screenings, and health education through workshops, tabling events, and “Lunch and Learn” sessions. By creating safe spaces for community members to share their experiences with healthcare, identify key local resources, and discuss everyday challenges, SSFC is committed to directing its funding and services based on community-informed priorities rather than preexisting models of care.
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Students: Sylvia Edoigiawerie
Community Partner: Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago
Project Area: Community Support
Project: Sylvia spent the past year partnering with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago through the student‑led Create for a Cause initiative. With Sylvia’s interest in community‑centered advocacy and creative, accessible service projects, she worked with the organization to coordinate an art auction supporting programs focused on food security, housing support, family services, refugee resettlement, senior care, and crisis assistance. Students voted on Catholic Charities as the community partner, and Sylvia collaborated with Pritzker medical students, who submitted original artwork for the auction. Together, they shaped the final project by aligning student creativity with the organization’s needs and mission. The event raised funds for the selected programs and strengthened the connection between the medical school and a long‑standing Chicago service network.
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Students: Riley O'Neal and Rebecca Kim
Community Partner: Migrant Support Collective and Center on Halsted
Project Area: LGBTQIA+ Migrant Health
Project: Rebecca and Riley spent the past several months partnering with Migrant Support Collective and Center on Halsted. Guided by their shared passions for immigration reform and LGBTQIA+ health, they are working with both organizations to empower community members with tools to use art as a means of healing, storytelling, and advocacy. Riley and Rebecca connected with MSC after learning about its efforts to support LGBTQIA+ migrants, particularly through the organization’s upcoming Art as Advocacy initiative. Together, they developed a “ramp-up” workshop exploring the intersections of immigration, health, and art. Materials created during the event will directly support MSC’s community programming with LGBTQIA+ migrants and serve as a foundation for participants to stay involved in additional Art as Advocacy initiatives taking place this fall.
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Student: Tanaya Kollipara
Community Partner: SHARE Network
Project Area: Fall/Fragility Fracture Prevention
Project: Tanaya spent the beginning of her Albert Schweitzer Fellowship year partnering with the Southside Healthy Aging Resource Experts (SHARE) Network. With Tanaya’s interests in bone health (especially women’s bone health), health equity, gender disparities, and culturally responsive community education, she worked with the SHARE Network to collaborate on addressing gaps in upstream bone health literacy, osteoporosis awareness and prevention (especially for post-menopausal women), fall/fragility fracture prevention education, and access to preventative care among underserved older adults. Through community needs assessments (including focus groups, stakeholder interviews, participation in outreach events, and conversations with community members) Tanaya and the SHARE Network identified a need for accessible, community-centered education that empowers older adults to proactively engage with their bone health before fractures or severe mobility limitations occur, rather than the current reactive, post-fracture education model. These findings informed the development of Bones & Balance, a preventative bone health and fall prevention initiative that includes culturally competent educational workshops, low-cost fall/fragility prevention strategies that take systemic barriers into account, bite-sized clinic waiting room educational materials, a proxy-risk screening survey to identify individuals at increased risk for poor bone health outcomes, and a patient conversation guide designed to help participants more confidently discuss screening and preventative care with primary care providers. Over the course of the fellowship year, Tanaya will continue developing curriculum, leading educational sessions, providing home safety and fall-risk reduction education at community sites, evaluating project impact through participant feedback and assessments, and refining project interventions alongside community stakeholders with the long-term goal of creating a sustainable, low-cost, and scalable model for an upstream, preventative bone/musculoskeletal health education within underserved communities.
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Student: Imran Khan
Community Partner: Chicago Recovery Alliance
Project Area: Street Medicine
Project: Imran has been working with Chicago Recovery Alliance (CRA), a local harm reduction nonprofit, to launch a community-based, low barrier wound care initiative for people who use drugs. Over the last 7 months, he has collaborated closely with staff at CRA to establish a coalition of medical students and providers from across the Chicagoland area dedicated to providing excellent care and support to program participants. Working together, the coalition successfully relaunched services at CRA on Easter Sunday, marking the first time since 2020 that the organization has been able to offer any wound care support to its clients. Imran is overjoyed that he has the opportunity and privilege to endeavor alongside such experienced and dedicated leaders to build capacity to address the acute needs of some of the most disempowered members of our community. In the future, he intends to continue to work in partnership with staff and participants to expand service provision by offering wound care aboard CRA’s vans taken on street outreach to sites throughout the city five days a week.
If you are interested in donating, volunteering, or connecting to any of the above organizations, please follow the links below: