By Allison Horton
First-year medical students got a chance to learn more about the South Side neighborhoods served by the Medical Center through participating in the second “Pritzker Day of Service” October 10.
“The idea is to introduce first-year medical students to this community and also to give some manpower to ongoing community service projects in South Chicago,” said Laura Blinkhorn, a second-year medical student involved in the Pritzker Community Service Fellowship, a student organization that sponsors the event and is devoted to developing physician leaders. She helped direct other medical students this year as they prepared a community garden for the winter.
Blinkhorn was one of more than 20 Pritzker students who harvested crops such as peppers and tomatoes and turned over the garden for the South Chicago Art Center, 3217 E. 91st St., which provides free in-school and after-school art programs to eight schools in the Washington Park and Englewood neighborhoods. Community residents help take care of the garden and receive the crops, which helps an area where the average annual income of $12,000 is well below the poverty line. Any excess produce is donated to local food pantries.
Sarah Ward, executive director of the art center, said the garden once was a parking lot for area steel mills and a gas station. “I wanted the kids to feel better about themselves,” she said. “To be able to see a butterfly land on a flower and draw it and enjoy the outdoors that’s not concrete and broken glass,” she said.
Other Pritzker students volunteered at the Gary Comer Youth Center, 7200 S. Ingleside Ave., which provides after-school programs such as health and wellness classes, academic tutoring and college mentoring to youth in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. The center is also home to the South Shore Drill Team, a nearly 30-year-old organization that trains young people to perform flag, rifle and dance routines and takes them around the world to show their stuff.
More than 50 medical students cleaned fitness equipment, worked in a rooftop garden and helped kids make Halloween crafts. Gabrielle Zeigler, a 16-year-old Hyde Park Academy student who has been attending the center for three years, said she enjoyed doing Halloween crafts with the medical students.
“It was fun,” she said. “We got a chance to meet new people and work with them. If we needed extra help with what we were doing, we had the extra help.”
Rebecca Levine, a second-year medical student and a fellowship board member, said volunteering helps the Medical Center grow roots in the community. “There is a significant degree of passion at our school for service and for giving back, and we are really focusing on these long-term partnerships in the South Side neighborhoods,” she said.
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