Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Health Equity Receives Grant from Bank of America

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) Center for Health Equity received a $1 million grant from Bank of America to launch the Block Builds Program and improve children’s overall health in West Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia residential segregation and economic inequality have created neighborhoods of concentrated poverty with immense inequities. For example, in West and Southwest Philadelphia more than one-third of children live below the poverty line.

Bank of America’s investment will provide critical start-up funding for CHOP’s Center for Health Equity and enable a targeted health housing invention, Block Builds, which will extend the hospital’s evidence-based Community Asthma Prevention Program Plus (CAPP+) to make over 100 homes in West Philadelphia healthier, directly impacting more than 400 individuals. Through collaborations with Rebuilding Together Philadelphia and Habitat for Humanity, as well as minority- and women-owned contractors identified through The Enterprise Center, homes are repaired and asthma triggers are removed at no cost to families. Block Builds will now expand our reach to doing exterior repairs for the entire neighborhood.