First Friday Club of Chicago podcast First Friday Club of Chicago

A confident, reassuring presence during Gov. Pritzker’s daily covid briefings, Dr. Ngozi Ezike in 2022 left the Illinois Department of Public Health to lead Sinai Chicago. And, while steering this major, 105-year-old Chicago healthcare institution, she’s keeping her eye on the broader picture.
“Understanding health care is more than what happens with doctors and nurses,” she says. “We have to see the related other pieces: having insurance, having a safe space to exercise, having a grocery store nearby so you can buy healthy food. We’re in the minority among developed nations in how we don’t see health care as a right. Instead there are haves and have nots.”
Located on Chicago’s West Side, Sinai Hospital offers a case in point: 70% of its patients are on Medicaid. West Siders’ life expectancy is 16 years shorter than that of folks who live just a few miles away in the Loop. Ezike insists that this status quo is simply not acceptable. “More people need to be thinking about this,” she says. “Our words and our actions really have to match.”
As a healthcare leader who has dedicated her career to serving disadvantaged communities and fighting health care disparities, Ezike will point to the bigger picture of how we can work together to ensure decent healthcare for all Chicagoans.
Raised in Los Angeles and a mother of four, Dr. Ezike credits her husband, Dr. Emeka Ezike and her faith in a higher power for helping her deal with the stress from her jobs, especially during the pandemic. A graduate of Harvard, Dr. Ezike worked for 15 years for Cook County Health, addressing the needs of the residents of Cook County. She also served as medical director of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and of Austin Health Center on the West Side.
 

Mary Meg McCarthy is the Executive Director of Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center

"The Sacredness of Storytelling"
Through the power of stories that speak to the heart, Otis Moss III tackles the theme of democracy—and what we can do in this moment, when we fear that ours is coming apart at the seams. “Appropriate storytelling leads to appropriate action,” he says. “If you don’t have the right story, you repeat the last chapter over and over again--you never get to a new one.”
This father of two calls us to consider our responsibility for the future: “Every generation has a call it must accept, to lay a brick in the cathedral that we’re attempting to build for our children’s children.”  A believer in the sacredness of history, Moss will tell stories of people who, despite having fewer resources than many of us, made an incredible difference in our world.
 

Shermann 'Dilla Thomas:
"Everything Dope About America Comes From Chicago" :
Chicago's Urban Historian Shares his passion for teaching people about the city he loves.
Also, a special performance from the Leo High School Choir.

Join us to hear how the Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul traces his commitment to social justice back to his Haitian immigrant parents and his childhood on Chicago’s South Side

Howard Reich, son of Holocaust survivors and journalist for the Chicago Tribune, was handed a simple assignment to interview Elie Wiesel, best known for his famous Holocaust memoir Night and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Daily phone calls and multiple in-person meetings with Wiesel would eventually turn Reich’s “simple” assignment into four years of intimate conversations which ended shortly before Elie died. The time spent together grew into a friendship through shared stories and a common bond between Howard’s father and Elie; both men were liberated from the Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945.