TCA Health Develops the Recipe for a Healthier Community with New Nutrition, Innovation, and Wellness Center May 27, 2025

“We have been providing services to this community for many years, working with multiple generations of families, and when people walk through our doors, it’s like the TV show Cheers where everyone knows your name,” says Veronica Clarke, president and CEO of Federally Qualified Health Center TCA Health. “There’s a family feel, and the people are why we continue to invest in Altgeld Gardens. This community has a right to all of the resources any other community has, and what we most want people to feel when they visit our new facility is pride that such a beautiful place is in their community.”   

Established in 1970, TCA provides primary care, dental, behavioral health, and other supportive services. The facility Clarke is referring to is a new, 10,000-square-foot nutrition, innovation, and wellness center that TCA will open this fall in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens community to meet a pressing local need for easily accessible fresh and nutritious food, which hasn’t been available since 2018 when the community’s only full-service grocery store closed. With the new building connected to TCA’s longtime headquarters and primary clinic, which will be expanded as part of the project, the nutrition, innovation, and wellness center will greatly increase TCA’s capacity to implement its “food-is-medicine” approach to health care.  

TCA’s primary means of doing so will be a new client choice food pantry equipped to serve up to 800 people per month. Unlike traditional food pantries, where those visiting receive pre-selected items with limited opportunity to select or exchange, TCA’s pantry will resemble a small grocery store that offers visitors the opportunity to pick out the food items they want. This model better meets the needs of individuals and families visiting the pantry and reduces food waste that occurs when visitors are forced to take home products they don’t like or aren’t sure how to prepare.  

“In traditional food pantries, visitors are receiving whatever rescue items the pantry has at the time, and there’s sometimes an attitude that, because the food is free, you shouldn’t question whether it’s food you actually want,” says Clarke. “But there’s no dignity in that, and we know how much of that food ends up in the trash. TCA wants to provide food that we know people will use to feed their families.” 

Amplifying the positive impact of TCA’s client choice food pantry will be a commercial kitchen that the organization plans to use to host cooking classes featuring nutrient-dense and affordable meals; a café with indoor and outdoor seating to serve healthy food options to 350 patrons per week; and a wellness, movement, and community meeting space to support fitness medication and holistic health education. The facility itself will have a green roof, and TCA plans to plant a vegetable garden at ground level to provide a venue for gardening classes that will be paired with additional green space for fitness activities like yoga. All told, the new facility will enable TCA to provide 1,500 clients annually with nutrition and wellness services, while its expanded primary facility will ensure that more than 11,700 patients each year have access to high-quality health care.  

The nutrition, innovation, and wellness center will also include additional office space to meet TCA’s administrative needs, flexible work and meeting spaces that can be rented by community members, storage, and parking for 50 cars – a necessity until the nearby extension of the Chicago Transit Authority’s red line train is completed and more directly connects Altgeld Gardens to the broader city. 

Located on Chicago’s far South Side, Altgeld Gardens is a sprawling public housing complex with nearly 1,500 homes on a 190-acre site. Opened in the 1940s by the federal government to house Black war industry workers, returning servicemen, and their families who faced housing discrimination elsewhere in the city, Altgeld Gardens was designed as a self-contained community with a wide range of resources on the property that included schools, a library, and a shopping center. Over time, however, disinvestment in the housing stock, the community’s geographic isolation and lack of public transit options, and proximity to the largest concentration of hazardous waste sites in the United States created a wide range of environmental, health, and economic challenges that residents and community-driven organizations like TCA have worked to address for decades (see the sidebar at the bottom of the page for additional details).  

In stark contrast to the brownfield sites that ring the community, TCA’s new facility, which was designed by Wheeler Kearns Architects and is being built by Milhouse Construction, will meet sustainable design criteria established by the U.S. Green Building Council. IFF’s Real Estate Solutions team, which provided predevelopment support for the project by working with TCA to procure a general contractor, establish a project budget, and more, is also serving as the owner’s representative during the buildout of the facility.  

“No one on TCA’s staff has an architecture or construction background, and even if we had that expertise on staff, everyone is stretched thin in the health care sector since the pandemic,” says Clarke. “It means a lot to us to have that expertise and guidance to navigate decision-making.” 

In addition to hands-on real estate and construction support, realizing its vision for a beautiful, sustainable facility purpose-built for its nutrition and wellness programming required of TCA a willingness to look beyond the development costs while making decisions about the direction of the project. Rather than value engineering components of the facility that the organization saw as essential to providing high-quality services, and particularly those that were designed with community input in mind, TCA doubled down on its plans and worked tirelessly over a multi-year period to secure the funding and financing needed to execute the $17.25 million project.  

These efforts paid off, with the project ultimately facilitated by a $4.7 million loan from IFF that bridged a reimbursable capital grant from the State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity sponsored by Illinois State Rep. Thaddeus Jones (29th District), a $7 million federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation and a $6 million Illinois State NMTC allocation from IFF, a $9 million federal NMTC allocation from Chicago Development Fund, a loan from a traditional lender, and agency equity. The NMTC Program funds high-impact projects in communities where other sources of funding aren’t available, providing nonprofits like TCA with a powerful financing tool that amplifies the impact of their mission-driven work. 

“Faith moves mountains,” says Clarke. “We had a vision and worked really hard to make it a reality. In the end, with the support of IFF and our other partners, we were able to do exactly what we wanted and what this community needs by creating functional, beautiful spaces that not only benefit our clients but our staff, too. In an environment when there are all kinds of potential funding cuts on the table for organizations like TCA, it’s hard to overstate the value of a project like this one to create excitement about the direction we’re headed and what it means for Altgeld Gardens.” 

Read about additional health care projects in the Midwest IFF has helped to facilitate