Narrator: At Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, our employees care about our patients and families, and many employees volunteer their time to support our communities. CHOP Leadership recognizes their commitment to serving others and encourages further involvement through the CHOP Cares Community Grant Program.

Since 2013, the Office of Community Impact has provided essential funding to CHOP employees to support their efforts in addressing priority health needs throughout the community served by the CHOP Care Network. We've supported communities across the southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey region.

In 2019, the CHOP Cares Excel Grant was introduced to help with growth and sustainability of CHOP Care's Community Grant Projects to have an even greater impact. In its first 10 years, the CHOP Cares Community Grant Program awarded over $1 million to over 200 employee led programs, such as gun violence prevention workshops, food distribution, parent and youth support groups, menstrual hygiene education, I STEM workshops, career exploration activities and internships, health screenings, and so much more.

Many community grant projects have been integrated into CHOP's robust community programming. Listen to one example that has become an essential part of CHOP's literacy efforts.

Narrator 2: Have you ever had an idea for something that could make a positive impact on the people around you, your patients, your community, your coworkers? In 2015, I had an idea: to give a book to babies. I wanted to get families of all newborns, started on the right foot in promoting early literacy, to boost reading success and to foster a positive parent-child relationship.

I wanted to connect all families to local and online resources, yay libraries, to help parents raise readers and to feel part of their community. I wanted all families to know they are valued by presenting these materials as a gift, and I wanted it to be fun. I bounced the idea off several colleagues who liked it, and so the Books for Babies Program was born. We received initial funding from a local grant, but needed a new source of revenue, after the first year. In the fall of 2016, I applied to the newly developed CHOP Cares Grant Program and was excited to be chosen to receive funding to cover another year of cost. In the process, I also learned how to write an effective grant with coaching from the CHOP Community Impact Team, and connected with other grant recipients and early literacy advocates at CHOP.

My project was featured in the CHOP Community Impact Report and I presented it to CHOP's Community Advisory Board. I learned a great deal about community health needs, assessments and presented a poster at the Association for Community Health Improvement National Conference in Atlanta. With the continued success of the program at my local hospital, Grand View incorporated the cost into their maternal child budget. The families and staff at Grand View Hospital couldn't be happier. After five years of success at Grand View, I looked outward to see how to expand this program to other CHOP network sites. Once again, CHOP was there, this time with the Excel Grant, specifically designed for recipients of the CARES grants who were hoping to grow their programs. In 2021, I was awarded the much larger CHOP Excel Grant and brought my program to seven new sites in the network. The expertise of any CHOP department I needed was now at my fingertips. I was able to grow the program from serving a thousand families per year to 10,000.

You can find out more about it on CHOP's early literacy webpage, that I even helped to create. This was an incredible journey which began, grew, and continues to prosper due to the ongoing support of the CHOP Community Impact Department, the CHOP Grants Programs, and the commitment of the whole CHOP enterprise to help their employees support children and families in their communities.

Thank you.

Narrator: This work could not be possible without the ongoing commitment of CHOP employees. They are the driving force, meeting the community where they are, and providing services that go beyond patient care. If you are interested in learning more or supporting the Chop Cares Community Grant Program, contact the Office of Community Impact at CHOPcaresgrants@chop.edu. We also wanna thank everyone that supports the program, including CHOP Leadership, the CHOP Cares Community Advisory Board, and our community partners. We know we are better together, so as we look into the future, we welcome you to join our mission.