The Heroes of Healthy Habits program by Chicago Commons’ Family Hub supports nearly 470 low-income families annually on the South and West sides. Recently awarded a Sun Life grant, the program expands diabetes awareness with culturally relevant initiatives, including leadership training, nutrition workshops, and one-on-one counseling.
Heroes of Healthy Habits
Heroes of Healthy Habits incorporates stress-reduction, a parent support group, and money management into a holistic approach to diabetes prevention and management. The program is integrating existing programs for our families at our early education centers and pilot new programming for our older adult population.
The Family Hub Health and Wellness workshops already include cooking demonstrations, nutrition, and diabetes education. Home care aides provide one-on-one health supports to 1,100 older adults in their homes every year. Our most recent initiative delivering critical health messaging to both early childhood and senior care clients is focused on COVID-19 vaccine education, which also includes outreach to Chicago Commons’ staff.
This holistic aspect of our work will provide a parent support group for families to address their concerns that interfere with health behavior change and food choices related to diabetes management and prevention.
New Program Initiatives
We are also excited for the new programming components that include:
- Developing diabetes-related health messages based on input from the community.
- Access to nutritionists for individual health coaching.
- Developing parent and home care aide leaders to co-facilitate workshops.
- Piloting an expansion of home care aide training, enabling a subset of them to provide one-on-one health education on a specific topic to seniors in their care.
Ensuring that our families and Adult Day Service participants have credible information for diabetes prevention is key to preventing the disease, expanding the number who seek access to health interventions, and receive treatment.
Guadalupano Family Center Cooking Classes
As part of Heroes of Healthy Habits, we kicked –off cooking classes at Guadalupano Family Center with school– age kids on creating healthier choices through food experiences.
The curriculum includes diabetes education and children are learning to safely prepare cut fruits and vegetables. So far, we have made yogurt parfaits, quesadillas with guacamole, and pizzas. Yum!
This program is generously sponsored by:
To read the full grant announcement, visit Sun Life.
