10 people who gave me hope in 2020
It was a year like no other. But in and among the sorrows and struggles, humans showed up and did the work of healing and helping and hoping. (Yes, even hoping took some work this year.) Here are 10 (or so) people I wrote about in 2020 who did all of the above. I could easily have doubled this list if I had the space.
Erika Castro
Erika Castro and her husband, Pablo Sanchez, bought Gyros Planet in Evanston, Illinois, one year before the pandemic hit, and it quickly became a favorite among neighborhood families and students. In April, they started delivering a few dozen free meals each day, hoping to fill the growing hunger gap in their community. Demand was such that they set up a table every day at lunchtime and filled it with free meals. By late November, they had given away 23,840 meals. “We need to trust God and feel that we will be fine,” Castro told me. “My husband said, ‘Even if we lose the restaurant, we did something good.’ ”
Bob Pinta
Bob Pinta, a computer science teacher, spent his summer inventing a Z-shaped wooden contraption to set his phone on during remote teaching so his students could see both his face and the equations he trained his phone on below. It worked so well, he made some for his teacher wife and teacher friends. Those worked so well, he started building and selling them to folks all over the country, embodying the creativity and resourcefulness and flat-out love that educators bring to their jobs during this pandemic. “Teachers are trying to make this as awesome as they can for kids,” he said.
ToshaWilson
Tosha Wilson, an Evanston, Illinois, police officer, plans to open a laundromat cafe in Evanston’s historically Black 5th Ward when she retires. The process has taught her some frustrating lessons about procuring loans, so in July she started a Facebook group called Boosting Black Business. Every month she highlights different Black startups and asks the Facebook group to send $20 their way, seeding and growing a beautiful community of helpers. “You not only have to push yourself through, you have to push others through,” she said. “If we’re all locked in chains, there’s no way I can move if you can’t move. Everyone has to move or we can’t move together.”
Jacob Kniep
Inspired by children’s author Robin Stevenson being uninvited from a Wheaton, Illinois, elementary school over the LGBTQ subject matter in her books, Wheaton resident Jacob Kniep launched an organization called OUTspoken Illinois to provide a safe place for LGBTQ people of all ages. In June, his #WheatonProud campaign invited businesses to display affirming stickers in their windows. Dozens of storefronts painted their windows as well. “This is a Wheaton I really never thought I’d see,” Kniep said, “with all the rainbows and love and support.”
Catherine Calligas
Catherine Calligas’ 5-year-old daughter, Anne Marie, has a rare disease called Abernethy malformation. Dr. Riccardo Superina at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago (aka “Dr. Superman”) happens to specialize in the disease, and Calligas, who lives in Alabama, found him through the most momway possible: staying up all night trying different email addresses. Superina answered, the Calligas family temporarily moved to Chicago during a pandemic and Anne Marie got her lifesaving surgery. “It’s a tribute to the relentlessness of parents who want the best for their child, really,” Superina told me. Indeed.
Michael Albert
If you’ve watched Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s coronavirus briefings, you’ve seen Michael Albert. He’s a sign
language interpreter who gracefully and emphatically translates crucial guidance, directives and compassion from Pritzker and public health experts. There is beauty in his rapid-fire translations, and his TV appearances turned him into a bit of a star. He deflects all praise. “My only goal is to get a clear and accurate message to an audience,” he told me in March. “I can’t emphasize enough that this is really about a health crisis and a community that needs information.”
Dayvin Hallmon
Dayvin Hallmon founded and directs the Black
String Triage Ensemble, an all-volunteer group of Black and Latinx string players from in and around Milwaukee. When a tragedy occurs, they bring their instruments to the scene and play a concert. They go to shootings, suicides, overdoses, house fires, car accidents. This summer, they played during the protests in Kenosha, Wiconsin. “To guard against hardening our humanity,” Hallmon said. “The humanity that’s been lost — whether it’s because we view someone as expendable or just
a sheer lack of care and compassion — this is how we begin to rescue that back.”
Krishita Dutta and Lauren Tapper
These two high schoolers launched a website called COVID-TV (covid-tv.com) for teenagers to share blog posts about their lives during the coronavirus pandemic. They asked friends and family to spread the word and quickly attracted chronicles from around the globe. “Everyone is going through this,” Krishita Dutta told me in April, “whether we speak the same language, whether we’re even in the same country.” But it still feels lonely, and Dutta and Lauren Tapper helped ease that immensely.
Darlene Hightower
Darlene Hightower, Rush University Medical Center’s vice president for community health equity, connects the dots between health and equity and works to improve both for Chicago’s residents, particularly the Black and Latino residents hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. “We’ve got this trifecta of events happen
ing — from the pandemic to the economic crisis to the killing of George Floyd,” Hightower said in June. “We are in unprecedented times, and that calls for unprecedented solutions.” She’s on it.
Health care workers
From Sharon Sullivan, a nurse and single mom who worried about leaving her kids orphaned, to the hundreds of hospital workers who turned out for a #WhiteCoatsForBlackLives demonstration in June to the dozens of medical experts I’ve turned to for expert guidance about COVID-19 (including my own bout with it), health care workers were the North Star of 2020 — pointing us toward a better, brighter day in the midst of some of our darkest ones. I’m grateful to walk among them.