Red Cross Training (Community Health Corps)

Who We Are and Our Mission:

Community Health Corps (CHC) is a grassroots student organization that was founded in 2014 and aims to empower individuals to be advocates for their health by increasing access to health information resources in the Evanston and Skokie communities. Community Health Corps has two primary initiatives. The first initiative is the HIRCULES Health Hub, which strives to deliver comprehensive, up-to-date, and relevant health information resources to members of the community through a health desk run by Northwestern student volunteers at the Evanston and Skokie Public Libraries. The Red Cross Training Corps (RCTC) is the second initiative of the Community Health Corps, whose purpose is to provide equitable access to Red Cross certification courses to community members regardless of socioeconomic status. Our partnership is unique and groundbreaking in that we are the first university in America to directly form a working partnership with the American Red Cross and AmeriCorps. We have negotiated an unprecedented contract that allows for our trainers to certify community members free of charge and provide these courses at highly discounted rates at Northwestern University.

Why We Need Your Help:

By the end of the 2020–21 school year, the Red Cross Training Corps aims to have trained 300 people from the Northwestern, Evanston, Skokie, and Chicago communities. However, we currently lack some of the basic supplies necessary to ensure that our class participants are receiving the highest quality of training possible. We rely on the McGaw YMCA to supplement our supplies with some of their resources, such as infant mannikins, which makes it challenging to expand the scope of our initiative. In order to work toward becoming more independent as an organization and ensure that our class participants learn in a comfortable and inclusive setting, we must ensure that there are enough materials for everybody in the class. Establishing a baseline stock of supplies for the Red Cross Training Corps classes is necessary before we can expand the capacity of the RCTC mission, and so we would like to add to our starting fund in order to purchase the materials necessary to teach CPR and first aid courses and to subsidize the cost of instructor trainings for our student volunteers. All of these materials will allow us to develop greater independence as an organization, better equipping and preparing the Red Cross Training Corps when serving the community.