The Sankofa Village Wellness Center in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood will hold its grand opening on Thursday, April 23.
The center is a joint effort by Rush University System for Health, Erie Family Health Centers, the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago and other organizations that aims to improve health outcomes for thousands of residents on Chicago’s West Side. In response to its Community Health Needs Assessment, Rush partnered with the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, the MAAFA Redemption Project and West Side United to establish the center.
Research and public health data has shown that the predominantly Black residents there have a life expectancy up to 18 years less than the largely white residents in Chicago’s Loop just five miles to the east.
“Addressing these kinds of unacceptable health inequities not only requires better access to health care in underserved communities like the West Side, but better access to jobs, healthy food and recreation and fitness activities,” says David Ansell, MD, senior vice president, community health equity at Rush University Medical Center. “The Sankofa Village Wellness Center brings together health care providers and additional resources to make the community’s overall environment healthier.”
Center participants provide interconnected services
The Sankofa Village Wellness Center, located at 4305 W. Madison St., is an entirely new building encompassing 60,000 square feet across three floors. Within it, the Rush Center for Community Well-Being at Sankofa Village Wellness Center will provide mental health services, addiction care, health and social needs screenings and wellness programming, often at no cost to participants.
Rush will refer patients to the Erie Sankofa Village Health Center, which will provide primary medical care for people of all ages, including medical, reproductive, dental and behavioral health care services and addiction care, regardless of a person's insurance status or ability to pay. The YMCA will support the wellness center’s indoor gymnasium and walking track, sports programs, fitness classes, youth and teen programs and child care services.
The Sankofa Village Wellness Center also will be home to a center operated by Equal Hope that will provide breast and reproductive health cancer screenings and support services for people with cancer. In addition, the wellness enter will include offices for West Side United, which will provide employment-related programs, and the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, a part owner of the center.
Support for healthy minds and bodies, close to home
The 3,200-square-foot Rush Center for Community Well-Being will be available to everyone, with a focus on increasing access to health services for West Side residents, community partners, businesses and families. The Rush Health and Social Care Response Team, comprised of licensed clinical social workers and community health workers, will connect residents to resources that their screenings have identified as needs, such as food, utilities and benefits. They’ll also provide help navigating the health care system.
Experienced clinicians will collaborate with early career therapists to provide individual and group therapy. Experts from Rush will hold community workshops on health and wellness topics to promote better health and disease prevention for both youths and adults. Rush’s nationally recognized Caring for Caregivers program will offer support for people caring for family members or friends to help them manage their responsibilities.
In addition, Rush will offer health promotion and disease intervention programs to address chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure and help participants manage them. The Rush center also will provide career pathways and workforce development programs and be a home for Rush’s Legacy Mental Health Fellowship program.
“We envision the Rush Center for Community Well-Being as a place where people can feel empowered to take charge of their health and connect with resources that support them,” says Rukiya Curvey Johnson, vice president of community health equity at Rush University Medical Center. “By bringing our services and programs to Sankofa Village Wellness Center, we’re making care and support more accessible to West Side residents — right in their neighborhood — while strengthening and coordinating our work alongside our partners in the center.”
Collaborating to connect community with care
In tandem with the wellness center’s launch, Rush and Erie Family Health have established an agreement to collaborate on connecting patients with needed care. Social workers and community health workers in Rush University Medical Center’s emergency department will be able to connect patients to Erie for ongoing primary care and a medical home to help them better manage their health and avoid ER visits.
When Erie Sankofa patients need specialty care, a shared electronic medical record system will allow Erie providers to schedule appointments with providers at Rush University Medical Center. Erie maternal health care providers will be credentialed to deliver babies at Rush, enabling hundreds of pregnant women who will get prenatal care at Erie Sankofa to deliver at the medical center with those same providers.
Erie ranks in the top 10 percent of community health centers nationwide and ranks first in quality in Illinois. It provides care for more than 95,000 patients at 13 locations in historically under-resourced communities and expects to serve approximately 6,000 patients annually at its Sankofa location.
“Creating these connecting points will help provide community members with a greater chance to be healthy because of the convenience of the location and the integration of the care providers,” Curvey Johnson says.
A village built on partnerships
The Sankofa Village Wellness Center is part of the larger Sankofa Village, a community endeavor that also will include the MAAFA Center for Arts and Activism (the MAC), the “K” Entrepreneurship Development Hub and the Community Grocer Initiative. The village is intended to spur economic development in the community and to provide opportunities for West Garfield Park residents to have access to health, wellness and recreation services, healthy food and the arts.
Groundbreaking for the Sankofa Village Wellness Center took place in September 2024. The center’s primary funding came from a $10 million grant that the entire Sankofa Wellness Village project received in 2022, when it was awarded the Chicago Prize in a competition established by the Pritzker Traubert Foundation to revive neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides.
The village also received a foundational $3 million gift from a generous anonymous Rush donor. Subsequent contributions from like-minded donors provided funding for the first year and a half of the Rush’s center’s program and staff expenses.
In addition, Rush has invested $1.5 million in capital and operational expenses for its center. “This center represents a meaningful investment by Rush, strengthened by the generosity and partnership of our donors,” Ansell says.
“The Sankofa Village is very much built on partnerships. Rush, Erie Family Health, the YMCA, Equal Hope, West Side United, and Garfield Park Rite to Wellness are very different organizations, but we’re all there to improve health, and improving health isn’t just about clinical care,” Ansell says. “We look forward to working with them to do far more together to improve the health of people in West Garfield Park than any of us could do on our own.”
Learn more about Rush’s services at the Rush Center for Community Well-Being at Sankofa Village Wellness Center.
To learn more about how you can support the Rush Center for Community Well-Being at the Sankofa Village Wellness Center, contact Michelle Boardman, senior director of development, at (312) 942-6884 or michelle_a_boardman@rush.edu.
