Forest Park's Central Park will fill with mascots, food trucks, and free health screenings on Saturday, August 22, when the City of Forest Park and We THRIVE! host the 6th Annual Live Healthy & Move event from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The free, all-ages event at 1201 West Kemper Road is timed to National Minority Donor Awareness Month and includes kidney and diabetes education alongside conversations about organ donation.
According to City of Forest Park, the event is organized in partnership with Network for Hope, the regional organ procurement organization behind the health fair, along with We THRIVE! in Forest Park. Attendees can get blood pressure and blood glucose screenings aboard the Ameritas Health Bus, and Network for Hope's Family Aftercare Team will be on-site to support donor families and anyone interested in the organization's services. Kids can climb through Ohio's largest ninja obstacle course, a 15-piece structure with zip lines and climbing features that opened at Central Park in May 2023, according to Southwest Ohio Parent Magazine.
The lineup also includes free food trucks, Kona Ice, live music, and line dancing, along with mascot appearances from Rosie Red of the Cincinnati Reds, Gary Gnome of FC Cincinnati, and the Bearcat of the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. We THRIVE is a Hamilton County Public Health initiative that partners with 24 local communities and eight school districts, including Forest Park, to promote chronic disease prevention, exercise programs, and access to fresh food, per Soapbox Cincinnati.
Why the Screenings Target Minority Communities
The timing is no accident. National Minority Donor Awareness Month began in 1996 as a national awareness week under the National Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program before growing into a full monthlong observance, according to Donate Life America. Racial and ethnic minority communities make up roughly 60% of the more than 100,000 people on the national organ transplant waiting list, the organization reports, even though they register as donors at lower rates than white Americans.
The health disparities driving that waiting list are stark. Black Americans are four times as likely as white Americans to develop end-stage kidney disease and tend to wait longer for kidney, heart, and lung transplants, according to data cited by the Indiana Donor Network from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. High blood pressure and diabetes are leading causes of kidney failure in minority populations, which is why Saturday's event pairs donation outreach with free screenings for both conditions.
Network for Hope Faces Federal Decertification, Says It Will Appeal
The event's timing also lands amid serious regulatory trouble for its sponsor. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services moved this month to decertify Network for Hope following a multi-agency investigation into patient-safety failures, according to The BMJ. Federal officials cited cases in which organ recovery was pursued while patients were still showing signs of life.
A federal review covering 2021 through 2024 examined 351 authorized but uncompleted organ donation cases at Network for Hope and found concerning failures in 103 of them — about 29.3% — including 73 patients who displayed neurological signs incompatible with organ recovery, per Sierra Sun Times. Network for Hope is one of 55 federally designated Organ Procurement Organizations in the country, covering a service area of roughly 7 million people across Kentucky, Southwest Ohio, Southern Indiana, and West Virginia.
Network for Hope says it strongly disagrees with the decertification decision and is filing an appeal, a process that can allow it to continue normal operations for over a year while the case is pending, according to WVXU. Regional health systems including UC Health have confirmed local transplant services remain uninterrupted during the appeal. Because the organization is continuing normal operations alongside its hospital partners, Saturday's Forest Park event is proceeding as planned.
Network for Hope has an existing track record of regional partnerships in Greater Cincinnati. Last year, the organization worked with the University of Cincinnati's Hoxworth Blood Center on shared transplant immunology testing that helped facilitate 642 organ transplants in 2024, as Hoodline previously reported.
For families heading to Central Park, the fair follows a busy summer of gatherings at the same municipal campus, near Winton Woods High School, which has also hosted the city's Jazz in the Park festival and a recent grown-up field day. Saturday's event remains free and open to all ages, with details available through the city and We THRIVE!'s websites.
