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TDCF Contributes $125,000 to Advance CHEA’s Health Equity Efforts

Oct 7, 2020

Penn Medicine’s Center for Health Equity Advancement (CHEA) is proud to announce the TD Charitable Foundation’s (TDCF) $125,000 contribution to CHEA.  This significant gift will sustain and promote CHEA’s efforts to achieve health equity with a critical focus on health inequities faced by Black communities.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, CHEA set up Penn Medicine’s Social Needs Response Team to assist patients with social needs and identified food access and food delivery as critical concerns for our patients.  To address these needs, CHEA formed creative partnerships with local small catering businesses and a community-based food access organization to deliver over 2,700 boxes of food to vulnerable households, including the elderly and individuals with disabilities in the first 15 weeks.

Building upon the success of this initial work, CHEA will launch a Food Access Support Technology (FAST) platform. This program will also support CHEA in expanding partnerships with local minority-owned small businesses, community-based food access organizations, and other health systems to facilitate a coordinated city-wide response to food insecurity in effort to track and improve health outcomes for vulnerable patients.   Over 300,000 Philadelphians are food insecure and food insecurity is associated with exacerbations of a myriad of chronic health conditions.  Therefore, this program will focus first on improving inequities in food access given its critical connection to health.

The TD Charitable Foundation’s giving is rooted in the bank’s corporate citizenship program, the TD Ready Commitment. This program enables the bank to play an active role in improving society in areas where it can have the greatest impact. This support allows CHEA to build the foundation for ongoing community investment to improve the health of our communities and equips CHEA with the resources and infrastructure essential in advancing health equity by helping those communities and patient populations hardest hit by the pandemic and economic crisis. This critical work would not be possible without this important gift from the TD Charitable Foundation.

The Penn Medicine Center for Health Equity Advancement (CHEA) formally launched in 2019 after four years of foundational work, with the goal of creating a learning health system that mindfully strives to achieve equity while developing the evidence-base to inform our efforts.  Uniquely situated within the Office of the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), University of Pennsylvania Health System, CHEA is home to Penn Medicine Program for LGBT Health and reflects a critical partnership between the Offices of the CMO and the Office of Inclusion and Diversity (OID) at Perelman School of Medicine.

CHEA consists of a diverse interdisciplinary team, led by Dr. Jaya Aysola, Founder and Executive Director. Our team is focused on developing, implementing, and evaluating a strategic combination of system-level, provider-level, and patient-level interventions to provide equitable health care, foster inclusive environments to support a diverse workforce, and engage communities to improve health outcomes for all populations. For more information, visit https://www.chea.upenn.edu/ or follow us on Twitter @PennCHEA.

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