Chicago, Illinois
Housing Authority: Chicago Housing Authority
Health Center: TCA Health, Inc.
Illinois issued special funding to community Health Center Programs to help individuals and families enroll into affordable health insurance plans. TCA Health Inc. (TCA), a health center in Chicago, had previously experienced challenges reaching public housing residents in their service area. TCA contacted the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to find ways to educate public housing residents about healthcare coverage and services available, particularly those in the Riverdale, Altgeld/Murray community.
TCA Health and CHA collaborated on a grant proposal to improve outreach and enrollment. As part of the grant application, each organization provided a letter of support defining the initiative and outlining the terms of the collaboration. With shared resources, TCA and CHA were able to hire and train two public housing residents to conduct outreach and enrollment activities. TCA worked with CHA’s property managers to enroll public housing residents into health insurance when they came in to pay their rent, at CHA laundromats, and at local advisory council meetings and other events hosted by CHA. Together, the organizations were able to maximize opportunities to reach residents and enroll them into affordable health insurance.
One of the greatest impacts of the collaboration was the sustained employment of two public housing residents. Those residents now have a stable source of income and are an essential part of the communication chain between the housing authority, health center, and residents. The original collaboration led to a gradual increase in the number of health-related initiatives in public housing, including a Youth Sports Fitness Program, Adult Fitness Program, Cooking Classes, Community Gardening Projects, Food Accessibility Initiatives, Community Health Education Workshops, and access to mobile health care services.
The collaboration was extremely effective in reaching public housing residents. Through their combined efforts, over 1,000 residents were enrolled into health insurance and 3,000 received one-on-one health education training. Another benefit of the partnership was the ability to collaborate with additional stakeholders to serve the residents. The two organizations planned and formed workgroups with 25 other organizations to identify and address various public housing resident issues. With more partners at the table, TCA and CHA were better positioned to identify key issues and barriers residents face in accessing health and social services, which then informed their programmatic goals.