In an unprecedented year, these six honorees — from the doctors who guided us through the bleakest days to the organizer who became the face of a revolution — showed us that humanity and hope persist.
Aleta Clark’s nickname is Englewood Barbie. “It was a joke at first,” says the longtime South Sider. “People started calling me that because they were like, ‘You’re from Englewood, you’re cute!’ So I just kept it.” Her bio on Instagram, where she goes by that handle to her 63,000 followers, declares: “I’m the flower growing through concrete.” Especially this year, in the throes of the pandemic, her commitment to her community has proved as deeply rooted and tenacious as a dandelion pushing between sidewalk squares.
In 2015, the mother of two founded the nonprofit Hugs No Slugs after double tragedies: the revenge-fueled gang execution of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee and the death of her own mother from a heroin overdose. “It just fucked my head up,” she says of the child’s murder. “All anyone could say was how bad that was, but they never said what they were going to do about it.” Her solution: grassroots, relentless services on a shoestring “to change the narrative that earning respect comes from hurting people when it should come from helping people.”
Since then, Clark has provided meals for the hungry through Club 51 — a winter-long nightly breaking of bread for those who live under the viaduct at 51st and Wentworth — and educational and recreational programs for youth. In May, as the pandemic was devastating the city’s Black neighborhoods, Clark opened her first “safe house” at 6427 South Ashland Avenue in Englewood, where she gives out groceries every Monday and Friday to anyone who needs them. She distributes 240 bags’ worth weekly and prides herself on the quality of the food. “I buy them good stuff — macaroni, steak, salmon, rice, stuff I eat,” she says, because “you never know when you’re going to get your last meal. Life is so short.”
Her efforts this year went beyond COVID-19. In July, she partnered with Louis Vuitton artistic director and Chicago native Virgil Abloh, who had slid into her DMs and offered to help, and the clothing store Notre on a sneaker raffle that raised $187,000. She soon secured sites for five more safe houses across the South Side, including the fourth and latest, at 79th and Paulina: the Tyshawn Lee House.
Even with big-name support (Chance the Rapper helped her hand out food to Black Lives Matter protesters), Clark’s operation stays down to earth. “If you’re really serious and want to help,” she says, you can show up at any of the safe houses from noon to 2 on a Monday or Friday, “and I’ll find something for you to do.” And if you’re a volunteer who’s also in need? She’ll have a bag of groceries for you.
This spring, the health inequalities between white Chicago and communities of color reached a crisis: Latinos were experiencing the highest rate of COVID-19 infections in Illinois, and Black Chicagoans were dying of the disease at disproportionate levels. Many people in Pilsen, where Tanya Lozano lives, including undocumented ones ineligible for stimulus checks, needed basic support fast. Most heartbreaking for Lozano personally, her own father was in a coma, on a ventilator.
“These disparities were more real than ever because of how quickly people were passing away,” Lozano says. “People got a reality check. Like, ‘Oh, wow, if we don’t do something for ourselves, we cannot stand around and rely on the systems in place.’ ” Lozano understands this in her bones — her uncle Rudy Lozano, the late Chicago labor activist, helped rally the Latino vote for Harold Washington in the ’80s.
In late April, she organized a spinoff of her nonprofit Healthy Hood Chicago, which uses wellness education to combat the life expectancy gap for underprivileged Chicagoans. We Got Us, a collective of community groups that has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers, started by addressing immediate needs, like food and masks. As of early October, it had fed about 10,000 families biweekly and expanded services to include a neighborhood pantry, grocery and hot meal delivery, and testing sites on the South and West Sides. It also hosts Survival Days in Pilsen, Humboldt Park, and Ashburn — a one-stop shop for free COVID and HIV testing, wellness checks, voter registration, and census filing.
This summer, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted downtown, Lozano organized a thousand-car caravan to carry in demonstrators and coordinated cleanup efforts for Black-owned businesses looted and vandalized on the South and West Sides. After some residents of Pilsen and Little Village harassed Black people entering their neighborhoods during the demonstrations, Lozano’s organizations spearheaded a Black and brown unity rally, which drew 3,000 attendees.
Lozano hopes to eventually expand the work of We Got Us to fill in cracks in hospital care. “The health care system doesn’t deal with the reasons why our people get sick. We can figure things out on our own. We don’t have to bow down and take defeat. And we definitely don’t have to watch our family members die.” Fortunately for Lozano, she hasn’t had to: After three months in and out of the hospital, her father came home in June.
There was probably no period of 2020 more chaotic than the second week of March. In a matter of days, COVID-19 went from an abstract threat to a very frightening reality that had already spread further in Chicago than we realized. On March 12, Governor J.B. Pritzker announced a ban on large gatherings. And then Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, stepped up to the podium, validated our bewilderment and fear, and delivered one clear, practical piece of advice she learned while on the ground in Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak: Stop shaking hands. What followed was a rallying cry for the COVID age: “I ask you to be guided by the science. … It’s not a time for panic. It’s a time for planning.”
A refrain throughout this year has been “Who could have predicted this?” But as Arwady told us during her first installment of “The Doc Is In: Ask Dr. Arwady” (her must-see Q&A series on social media), the emergency preparedness teams at both the city and state public health departments had made detailed plans for responding to a pandemic, from stockpiling PPE to handling food shortages, unemployment, and social unrest. And even though Arwady had been on the job for only four days when the plans were put into effect in January, she and Ngozi Ezike, the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, knew exactly what to do.
Public health workers usually remain in the background, but Arwady and Ezike became nearly as familiar as the mayor and the governor, appearing almost daily at press conferences and briefings and on social media, always ready to answer questions from officials, reporters, and ordinary Chicagoans. It’s an exhausting job with regular 17-hour days; Ezike has compared it to a marathon, with no time for rest or reflection. “It’s hard for people to understand that we can’t know everything about a brand-new virus right off the bat,” she says. “Even though it seems like a lifetime, we haven’t even known this virus for 10 months.”
Their styles are complementary. Arwady is energetic and always able to find something positive to say, even when the news is bad. Ezike has a calm and reassuring presence and has spoken eloquently about the importance of self-care; bilingual in Spanish, she’s able to talk directly to Latino Illinoisans. With their guidance, the state, the city, and individuals all worked together to flatten the curve.
Some communities were in a better position to weather the pandemic than others. As Arwady puts it: “Viruses look for chances to spread. They look for cracks in society.” Both doctors hope that the lessons we’ve all been learning will guide leaders toward making better decisions about how to care for their most vulnerable populations even when there isn’t a pandemic. Arwady, as usual, is optimistic: “I really do feel confident that we are going to come out of COVID a stronger city.”
Erick Williams says his work ethic is more that of an ant than a honeybee. Bees are tireless in their commitment to the task at hand but find themselves in decline in this changing, inhospitable world; ants, on the other hand, “do an incredible job as a team digging deep and always preparing for the worst-case scenario.”
When COVID-19 shut down in-person dining in March, Williams, the chef-owner of Virtue, the Hyde Park restaurant serving refined updates on Southern classics, dug deep. “We woke up one day and realized the pandemic is at our front door, and this industry is going to have the highest rate of employees being furloughed,” he recalls. For his 30-some team members, who hail mostly from the South Side, their jobs at Virtue have been a boost to their careers, but that stability was at risk.
To keep as many employees as possible paid, with benefits, the James Beard–nominated Williams made a hard pivot. He began selling to-go family meals to the public (and gave free ones to workers in the restaurant industry), to the tune of 320 to 600 meals per night. He stocked the cooler with free groceries for staff members to take home and started a crowdfund so he could offer them forgivable loans. “I reached out to many of my friends and supporters and pretty soon we raised $36,000 on GoFundMe.”
A friend on the medical staff at UChicago Medicine took note of the relatively inexpensive meals (a $48 feast fed three to four people) and bought out several nights’ production for the medical residents. Soon the beverage company Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits wrote a check to subsidize a night of meals for first responders at the hospital.
Then came Common, and with him a major PR boost. The rapper and actor, working with the dating app Bumble, tapped Virtue to feed about 80 essential workers at the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County. Williams added 300 meals from his own fundraising — and soon after began making daily deliveries to UChicago Medicine and twice-monthly drops to Stroger. Williams stopped offering takeout for the general public and devoted himself to serving only essential workers with the money from his GoFundMe page. Another $20,000 poured in.
Williams delivered more than 10,000 meals between April and the end of July, and has continued to quietly deliver food to UChicago, albeit on a smaller scale, even as Virtue reopened its patio. “ ‘Virtue,’ ” he says, “means maintaining a high moral standard and treating people with kindness and hospitality.” For Williams, that means marshaling resources to keep front-line workers feeling safe, healthy, and well fed.
On May 30 and the days that followed, Aislinn Pulley was scrambling to keep up with the situation on the ground. The Black Lives Matter Chicago cofounder was among the thousands who took to the streets downtown, marching in traffic in response to the death of George Floyd and other Black men and women killed by the police. One moment, she would be in an intersection holding her bullhorn calling out the names of those who had been killed or incarcerated, including, from the Chicago area, Laquan McDonald, Rekia Boyd, and Pierre Loury. The next, she was standing on the side of the street, texting, calling, emailing, and canvassing social media for the latest updates on the protests. Then she’d rush back to her bedroom-based home office in Hyde Park to handle the protesters’ needs: Who had been arrested? Who needed help? Which police stations were holding people and which attorneys were available to aid them?
For Pulley, the protests and aftermath felt like a tipping point, as Black Lives Matter was catapulted from a marginalized group sometimes dismissed as “fringe” to the center of a national reckoning on racial justice. “This new terrain was being formed right before our eyes, where masses of people were finally understanding the full breadth of the violence that people experience and demanding that it ends,” says Pulley, who is also co–executive director at the nonprofit Chicago Torture Justice Center, which provides social-emotional support to survivors of police brutality.
Pulley emerged as the face of Black Lives Matter Chicago, conducting local and national interviews from her bedroom office. And in late July, she stood at the microphone in Federal Plaza the day BLM Chicago and other organizations filed a civil rights lawsuit against federal law enforcement agencies to keep them from targeting protesters. “They are trying to suppress our righteous anger, and we will not be suppressed,” she said. “We will continue fighting back.”
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Just as images of Black people being knocked down by water hoses and attacked by dogs helped turn the tide during the civil rights movement in the ’60s, so have images like the ones Pulley saw this summer while protesting: one friend pinned to the ground by his neck as George Floyd had been weeks earlier by police in Minneapolis, another friend’s child pulled away by police. “The demands to defund the police, to reopen criminal cases, get cops out of schools, this is a long-term struggle and long-term work. And we want to keep the energy up.”