Committed to Service in the Western Suburbs
Rush Oak Park Hospital extends our commitment to our work on Chicago’s West Side. Our community programs include the following:
- Project Lifestyle Change, a free, yearlong education program for people with prediabetes; since 2010, more than 700 program graduates have learned about healthy eating and exercise habits.
- The Rush Surplus Project, Rush’s largest food distribution initiative, which originated at Rush Oak Park Hospital. The project donates surplus food from Rush’s cafeterias to local nonprofits that feed the hungry; it was such a success upon its 2015 launch in Oak Park that we expanded it to Rush University Medical Center in 2017.
- A partnership with Top Box Foods, a Chicago-based social business that provides affordable boxes of high-quality fresh produce to Rush’s “first community” of employees. In 2017, the first year of the program, employees picked up more than 1,100 boxes of healthy food at Rush Oak Park Hospital and Rush University Medical Center.
- Free screening mammograms for hundreds of women who lack health insurance, supported by grants from the Chicago Department of Public Health and a private foundation.
- Free quarterly Courage to Quit smoking cessation classes, which combine a cognitive behavioral approach with counseling and education about medication that can help smokers quit.
- Donations of linens and laundry services for the PADS shelter program at Housing Forward, which provides overnight shelter and meals at nine rotating sites in Berwyn, Forest Park and Oak Park. The program is a gateway for an array of supportive services that help people achieve housing stability.