Chicago Hyde Park Village

The mission of Chicago Hyde Park Village is to create a community of “neighbors helping neighbors” on the South Side of Chicago by providing opportunities for social engagement, educational programs, and facilitating volunteer support services and referrals to foster vibrant healthy aging.

We aim to accomplish this mission through these long term goals:

1. Empower and support healthy aging in place for CHPV members
2. Enable older adults on the South Side of Chicago to share, learn, and grown as they remain engaged in their community
3. Foster intergenerational interactions in Hyde Park and surrounding communities

To empower and support healthy aging in place for members, CHPV provides a wide range of member services and benefits. Full members receive access to the services of trained volunteers who provide transportation, assistance with tasks and errands, support at medical appointments, and wellness checks.

To enable older adults to remain engaged in their community, CHPV facilitates programs and activities open to community members. We hold drop-ins twice a month with exercise, lunch, and a variety of interesting programs. CHPV also facilitates various support groups and affinity groups which brings together community members interested in a specific topic.

To foster intergenerational interactions, CHPV coordinates events and programs that connect individuals across generations. As CHPV grows, we plan to further develop our intergenerational programming. Our goal is to establish a formal program to encourage social connections between the younger generations and isolated seniors.

Our newest initiative has been to get our community designated as a dementia-friendly community through Dementia Friendly America. This work is helping us to develop strong partnerships with other organizations and groups working to make communities more inclusive for older adults as they age and make adjustments associated with cognitive decline. The work focuses on many sectors including: social service agencies, transportation providers, legal & financial planning, health care community, local governments, residential settings, adult day programs, employers/human resources, community members, and caregiver support providers.

CHPV is lead by an engaged volunteer board whose members live in the community and who draw from many years of professional experience in fields such as health, social work, law, and accounting. We also rely on the dedication of our volunteers and small staff to both provide services to our members and to manage our programs.

In addition, we leverage strong partnerships with local businesses, faith based communities, community organizations, and institutions, including the University of Chicago Community Programs Accelerator and the SHARE Network. Our partners provide us with funding as well as in-kind support so we can continue to serve our members and the senior community.

CHPV benefits from shared experience and expertise as a member of the national Village to Village Network. Our organization is built on the village model which has been successfully used by over 250 organizations to build socially connected communities which support the aging population.

We have grown our membership base and team of volunteers at a sustainable rate since our founding. We currently have over 178 members and about 75 volunteers. Through our collaboration with the University of Chicago, we have completed a strategic planning process to guide the future of CHPV. In addition, we have revamped our member services program and expanded our community programs.

As CHPV continues to develop and grow, we aim to increase our staff in order to better serve our members and refine our internal operations. While Covid 19 has stimied many of our goals over the past year, we continue to aim to hire a case manager who can provide professional support to our members with complex needs. Once in-person programming is possible again from a health perspective, we plan to expand a recently started volunteer visiting program which has been very successful at reducing social isolation in older adults as well as very effective at recruiting new volunteers. In addition, we successfully started subsidized full memberships for low-income seniors in need of our services. In the long term, we aspire to open a senior center to serve south side seniors in need of services and socialization.