Chicagoans of the Year

As the polar vortex was bearing down on Chicago this past January, Candice Payne was planning to cocoon through the vicious cold snap with her laptop and her miniature Pomeranian, Fendi, at her home in suburban Hazel Crest. Then the real estate broker and rehabber thought about Tent City, the homeless encampment on the side of the Dan Ryan Expressway that she passes every day on her way to work. “People there will be sleeping on ice,” she remembers thinking. “This could kill someone.” So she made a spur-of-the-moment decision: She’d charge some hotel rooms on her Amex card and move a few people out of the cold. She figured she could afford 15 or 20 rooms for two days.

At first, Payne’s efforts stalled. Hotel managers told her housing the homeless would be bad for business. Finally, the Amber Inn, a motel in Bronzeville, agreed to rent her rooms. Payne posted to Instagram, asking for anyone with a van or SUV to help shuttle people to the motel, and then headed to Tent City. While she stood by a scrap-wood fire passing out motel keys, Payne’s post was going viral. “The tips of my fingers were numb, the air was crackling inside my lungs,” she says. “And then my phone exploded” — texts, emails, social media shares, and voicemails from people offering to help. Livery services wanted to donate their drivers. Churches offered their buses. Volunteers showed up with their cars. The Amber Inn was deluged with calls from strangers paying for more rooms.

In the end, Payne and her impromptu army moved 122 people into 70 rooms for five days of relief from the devastating freeze. “That first morning, I went to McDonald’s and said, ‘For real, give me 122 Egg McMuffins and 122 hash browns.’ ” She also made two runs to Walmart, one for toiletries and vitamins, and then one to help a woman who told Payne she’d lost her bra.

At first, Payne shied away from publicity, but when rumors started flying around town about who was behind the effort — was it Chance the Rapper? Oprah? — Payne decided to come forward. Within a week, she’d made an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where she received two $25,000 checks from Walmart. She has plowed that money into a nonprofit she created, Action for a Cause, which is working with local social services to provide housing for people transitioning off the streets.

All the attention was a bit of a shock, but she doesn’t regret stepping forward. “It’s important to show that you don’t have to be rich or famous to help others. If a working black woman who grew up in Auburn Gresham can do something, so can you.”

A few seasons back, in an effort to prolong his NHL career, Chicago Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews started focusing more intently on his health, particularly what he was putting into his body, and soon he was reading about conventional food systems and the environmental toll they exact. “I started connecting the dots,” he says, his chiseled face suddenly displaying an unblinking, hawk-eyed intensity. “I looked at how our food is raised and processed, and started to think about the climate and our ecosystem that humans have kind of obliterated.”

Toews decided to elevate his awakening from the personal level to the collective. In 2018, he established a partnership between his new Jonathan Toews Foundation and the New York City–based nonprofit Green Bronx Machine, which runs gardening and healthy eating programs in public schools. The mission: to create a new generation of environmental stewards from the ground up. Well, not from the ground, exactly. The program teaches students at 40 Chicago public schools how to grow vegetables using an aeroponic tower garden. Kids also prepare meals using their harvest and take part in a nine-week curriculum of enhanced in-class instruction in science, technology, engineering, and math.

“When the students watch the progress and they show up to class and this thing is just blooming, and they’re getting to try salads and herbs and throw it all into a big bowl, you feel their excitement and pride right away,” says Toews, who has visited a handful of the participating schools, most of which are underresourced. At early adopter John Spry Community School in Little Village, one middle-school-age boy told Toews that he didn’t know what kale was until starting the program.

“My students go through a lot in their lives,” says Spry teacher Alicia Song. “There’s trauma. Some violence. And good food is not necessarily the focus, because there are other things more pressing than having the best organic vegetables on their plates. So Jonathan’s message resonates with a lot of educators: Healthy students are at the heart of healthy schools, and healthy schools are at the heart of resilient communities. We need programs like this, especially in lower-income communities.”

Toews says he’s never been crazy about his nickname, Captain Serious, bestowed on him because of his stoic demeanor. He may not have to live with that moniker much longer. A new one has recently been thrown out there: Captain Planet.

Dawoud Bey knows how to photograph people. He’s been doing it practically his whole life. What he wasn’t so sure about was turning his lens away from faces and bodies and toward the more elusive notions of place and time. “It was terrifying,” he says of learning what was essentially a new mode of seeing for his most recent string of projects, starting in 2014 with a series on the changing landscape of Harlem. Though he ultimately achieved what he was going for, he acknowledges thinking: Maybe this is where it ends — you’ve had a good run.

“Good run” is a massive understatement. Bey, a native New Yorker who’s called Chicago home for more than 20 years, began shooting in 1975 and has produced a body of work as extraordinary as that of any living photographer, with numerous achievements along the way, including — just to name a few recent and forthcoming ones — a 2017 MacArthur “genius” fellowship; the publication in 2018 of the compendium Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply; a much-feted exhibition earlier this year at the Art Institute of Chicago; and, in 2020, a career-spanning survey organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

While a big retrospective is an honor, Bey isn’t one to dwell nostalgically in the past — even as the past deeply informs his new work, which enfolds and examines history, particularly that of African Americans. The Birmingham Project, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art (and then at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography), is a series of images that evoke the presence of the black children killed in the 1963 church bombing and the violence that followed, and Night Coming Tenderly, Black, shown at the Art Institute, consists of large-scale black-and-white images of reimagined Underground Railroad sites in northeastern Ohio. His current work in progress centers on plantations in Louisiana.

There’s a spirit of intense engagement, even activism, that runs through Bey’s photography. “I want the work to become experience, to become a part of the world that you’re in. I want it to come off the wall and do something.” In the years since Bey moved here to become a professor at Columbia College Chicago, he has lived by that same ethic, working assiduously to create educational opportunities that benefit the city’s emerging artists. He has, among other things, developed programs at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Arts Club of Chicago and helped implement a photography lecture series at Columbia’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. For him, images are transformative, whether you’re making them or viewing them.

One of the things I admire about Chicago,” says Alex Kotlowitz, “is it’s a city of outsiders, where outsiders can come in and really thrive.”

Kotlowitz is one of them. He grew up in Manhattan and worked as a community organizer in Atlanta and as a journalist in Lansing, Michigan, before he arrived here as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He intended to stay only two or three years. It’s now been 40. For 26 of those years, he’s lived in Oak Park, four blocks from the city limits; for 20, he’s taught at Northwestern University in Evanston. But for his best-known works — the 1991 book There Are No Children Here, the 2011 documentary The Interrupters, and this year’s acclaimed book, An American Summer — he immersed himself in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where he would always be an outsider by virtue of race and class.

“My first time in the Henry Horner Homes,” he remembers, “I felt a deep sense of shame. I was working a mile and a half from there. I went to Bulls games at the United Center. It was clear the minute I walked into that place how disturbingly distressed it was. After I began to spend time there, that sense of shame turned to anger.”

Kotlowitz doesn’t deal in the abstraction of public policy. Instead, he tells stories of specific people, not to answer questions, but to ask them. An American Summer asks how people deal with the trauma of gun violence, both as individuals and as a community. “It’s a myth that somehow people just push on and put it behind them,” he says. “We’ve got to deal with the foundational issues that lead to the violence, which is the lack of opportunity in parts of our city and parts of America.”

Previously, Kotlowitz thought there were only two paths available to him as an outsider: remain silent and complicit, or tell other people’s stories. Now he’s found a third: to give people tools to tell their own stories. While he was writing An American Summer, he began working with inmates studying writing at Stateville Correctional Center. Some of his students’ stories were published on the New Yorker’s website and broadcast on WBEZ. He continues his work at Stateville this fall.

Are Chicagoans ready to listen? “It’s still very much a tale of two cities,” Kotlowitz says. “You walk out of your house in Englewood and look at that gleaming skyline downtown, and you know it’s not yours.”

Maybe it takes an outsider to see our city with such stark clarity, both its beauty and its flaws.

How did Emmanuel Pratt and his nonprofit convert four rundown blocks in Englewood and Washington Park into a fertile community resource called the Commons?

“Urban acupuncture,” says Pratt, the cofounder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation. Meaning: You locate specific pain points, and you provide relief.

So if those blocks contain two weedy, vacant acres on Perry Avenue, turn them into a verdant community farm. That cracked, half-finished sidewalk? Perfect site for a weekly farmers’ market. Those dilapidated houses? Renovate them as a community hub for meetings, workshops, retreats, and cooking demonstrations, and add an art gallery and live-work spaces. And if you can provide more than a dozen jobs and apprenticeships along the way — plus a dozen more seasonal fellowships each year for artists and scholars from the University of Chicago, Harvard, and elsewhere — all the better.

Pratt didn’t grow up in Englewood or even Chicago, but the native of Richmond, Virginia, spent his childhood amid the same sorts of empty lots and foreclosed homes he works near today. To be sure, he could have parlayed his Ivy League degrees in architecture and urban design into a career in the private sector. But he says he had other dreams from the start. What were they?

“This,” he says, gesturing at the Commons. “Going from blight to light.”

Pratt cofounded the Sweet Water Foundation in 2009, and for the first few years, he dedicated the organization to using aquaponics and agriculture as vehicles for teaching STEAM skills to hundreds of students in Chicago and Milwaukee. In 2013, when the City of Chicago asked Sweet Water what it could do with an Englewood site where a previous agricultural initiative had failed, Pratt expanded its operations, and within a couple of years, the four-block Commons was born. He would like to expand it to 10 blocks.

In September, Pratt got some news that should help: He’s been awarded a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. He hasn’t decided yet how he’s going to spend the no-strings-attached gift, but among the possible beneficiaries is a new Sweet Water initiative for creating affordable and ecologically sustainable housing.

What Sweet Water represents, in Pratt’s estimation, is a fresh approach to equitable neighborhood renewal that is 100 percent hands-on. “You have to be on the ground,” he says. That’s where he plans to stay.

It costs me so little to help,” says Gloria Walsh of her volunteer work with Congolese refugees, and yet she’s saying this as she makes the second six-hour round trip in a week from her suburban Chicago home to Appleton, Wisconsin, where many of these families have settled. The first trip was to accompany a diabetic woman to a doctor’s appointment. This one is to meet with teachers who will be welcoming Congolese kids, many of whom speak little English, into their classrooms. Walsh spends up to 40 hours a week volunteering for the Lake County Resettlement Group, which for the past three years has helped refugee families navigate the complexities of life in their new country. Cost — in time, effort, and money — is all a matter of perspective, says Walsh. “The things that are so difficult for the Congolese families are so easy for me.”

Walsh wasn’t looking for a full-time commitment when she retired from her human resources job in 2017. She already volunteered at her church, and she signed on with the resettlement group for just a six-month stint helping a single Congolese family, the Makyabes, who lived in Rogers Park. “As soon as I met them, I knew this is what I had to do,” she says. “They just pulled me in.” Within a month, Walsh was driving into the city on a daily basis, assisting the Makyabes with an ever-growing list of needs. Communicating mostly through Google Translate, Walsh helped both parents find stable work. She accompanied them to the DMV. She drove around for hours searching for a store that sold cassava roots in bulk. Soon the Makyabes were referring other Congolese families in Rogers Park to Walsh. “Every time I showed up, there were more people.”

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The most persistent problem the families faced: making ends meet in an increasingly expensive city. In early 2018, Walsh met a recruiter from the JBS meat-processing plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who told her the company welcomed refugees. She also learned that Appleton, a short drive away, already had a small Congolese community. As of this year, she has helped four families relocate to Appleton and land jobs at JBS.

Today Walsh estimates that she’s assisted over 100 Congolese refugees across the Midwest, and she laughs at her earlier notion of helping them for just six months — this is now an open-ended commitment. “They are my family,” she says. “I want to be there for all the graduations and weddings.”