Evanston’s Chef Q heads list of 2021 Red Cross Heroes awards
With winners ranging from Park Ridge high school brothers who ran blood drives to an Evanston chef who made thousands of meals for the hungry, the American Red Cross of Illinois handed out its pandemic year heroes awards Thursday.
It is the charity’s 19th year of giving such recognition in the community, and “this year was even more meaningful because we know we were celebrating individuals that were literally saving lives, saving communities, and helping them recover during this pandemic,” said Celena Roldan, the organization’s Illinois region CEO.
Chef Q Ibraheem is an Evanston culinary worker who won the organization’s disaster services award. She pivoted from cooking underground dinners and catering to serving her community’s needy during the pandemic.
Through other work she does in the community, “I meet the moms and the aunts and the extended family members who pick these children up,” she said during the web-video ceremony recognizing the winners. “When this happened, I knew that the families that I work with would be directly affected. So it was really important — these are our future decision makers — to make sure that they have healthy food.”
Her ad hoc organization, Kids With Co-workers, was preparing more than 200 restaurant quality to-go meals daily, she said, and distributing them to a list of people in need that was greatly enlarged by the pandemic.
“The award itself means everything because I feel like our missions are aligned,” Chef Q said in an interview, but she also credited her team of volunteers and contributors who made the food-service work possible.
There were 24 winners across Illinois, a group split into four regions and various categories. The full list is here, but other Chicagoland winners included:
■ Carter and Noah Collins of Park Ridge, high school brothers who started a blood drive amid the 2017 hurricane season and have kept it going. During the pandemic year, they switched from doing it at a local school to their church, the Red Cross said.
■ Esther Lindor, online market coordinator for Chicago Lakeview Pantry, who helped the organization shift the ways its clients get food to a model of website-selection followed by convenient pickup model.
■ Lt. Quention Curtis, a Chicago firefighter and founder of the Black Fire Brigade, which has conducted training to get young people off the streets and into fire or emergency services careers.
■ Akbar Arsiwala, a Navy veteran who led a group of volunteers to replace a food pantry at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center on the Near West Side that the pandemic forced to close. By summer’s end, the Red Cross says, the new pantry was giving out more than 15,000 pounds of food monthly.
■ Tanya Lozano, a social activist from the Pilsen neighborhood, who guided creation during the pandemic of We Got Us, a spinoff from her Healthy Hood Chicago health and nutrition organization. We Got Us scrambled to feed some 10,000 families weekly while it also distributed personal protective equipment and set up COVID testing sites on the South and West sides, according to the Red Cross.
■ Leadership Village Academy fifth graders, who, over several years, led the ultimately successful push to get the massive Douglas Park in their North Lawndale neighborhood renamed Douglass Park. So a key location in the primarily Black neighborhood long named after 19th century U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, whose wife owned a Mississippi slave plantation, is now named for renowned abolitionist and Black intellectual Frederick Douglass.