In 2016, leaders of the Hektoen Institute of Medicine, the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, the Michael Reese Research & Education Foundation, the Portes Foundation and the Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago held a number of meetings to see if there were ways to do more to address areas of public health in metro Chicago beyond what their individual institutions were doing. Those meetings led to the formation of the Foxglove Alliance.
Today, the Foxglove Alliance (FGA) has evolved into a coalition of 15 (and growing) mostly not-for-profit organizations dedicated to improving public health in the Chicago metropolitan area through collaborations to develop new initiatives and programs, convene networking & educational events, engage in issue identification/resolution and conduct outreach and public awareness activities utilizing the resources of the members and a host of NGOs, individuals and strategic public and private sector partners. The reach of the FGA members is vast and is collectively connected to 200+ non-profit, for-profit, government and social enterprise entities in Chicago.
To-date, the Foxglove Alliance has helped launch I-DROP, the Illinois Drug Reuse Opportunity Program, to assist Illinois free and charitable clinics in securing a source of free prescription medications for thier patitents, debuted the Community Pulse public affairs television program on CAN TV that can be viewed on that station and streamed on this website and on YouTube and is advancing the More Minorities in Medical Research (M3R) campaign to increase the number of minorities participating in clinical trials and to get more Chicago youth to enter into careers in health care. In terms of current priorities, the FGA will continue to focus on those projects as well as promoting Chicago as a global life sciences innovation hub.
