2023 Impact Awards
seats or sponsorships.

a contribution.

seats or sponsorships.
a contribution.
Join us in honoring the local leaders making a difference in the lives of women and girls
at the 2023 Impact Awards. Presented by Chicago Foundation for Women.
Date
Wednesday
March 29, 2023
Venue
Harold Washington Library
Winter Garden
Address
400 S State St,
Chicago, IL 60605
Program
6 pm: Registration
6:30 pm: Ceremony
7 - 8 pm: Reception
Purchase group/individual seats or sponsorships.
Unable to attend? Consider a contribution.
Meet the 2023 Impact Awards Honorees
Impact Award Honoree

Erika Allen
Erika Allen
Erika Allen (she/her) is the Co-Founder & CEO – Operations for Urban Growers Collective and the President of Green ERA Educational NFP and Co-Owner of Green Era Sustainability Partners. Previously, Allen founded and was the Director of Growing Power – Chicago for 15 years from 2002 to 2017. Allen is the co-founder of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, serves on the board of Grow Greater Englewood and Leadership Council for Growing Home, and is an advisor for the Community Food Navigator project.
Allen has been appointed by IL Governor J.B. Pritzker for the IL Leadership Council for Agricultural Education (ICAE) for a 3 Year term (2022-2024). Allen was recently appointed by the Biden Administration to join the Farm Service Agency Committee for Illinois.
She is also a Co-Chair of the Food Equity Council for the City of Chicago. Allen received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Art Psychotherapy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She uses her experience as a visual artist to consult with individuals and organizations to support their visioning of social and economic changes.
She is passionate about social justice and working with multicultural groups in the elimination of racism, related oppressions, and the root causes of poverty by integrating creative and therapeutic techniques alongside food security and community development.
Impact Award Honoree

Beatris Burgos
Beatris Burgos
An indigenous Calchaqui woman from San Antonio de los Cobres in Salta, Argentina, Ms. Burgos has dedicated her life to addressing social change and has been a life-long advocate of women’s and children’s rights. Ms. Burgos has worked towards ending violence against women since 1986, when she began volunteering for CAWC (formerly known as the Chicago Abused Women Coalition). Through her leadership and commitment, CAWC has provided safe intervention, counseling, advocacy, and ongoing
support to over 33,000 survivors of domestic violence. In 1989, Ms. Burgos also served as a founding board member of Apna Ghar, a domestic violence program serving the Asian community in Chicago. In 1997, Apna Ghar honored Ms. Burgos for her commitment to the issue of domestic violence. Ms. Burgos received the Human Dignity Award from the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence in 2000.
In 2005 Ms. Burgos received the Community Advocate Award from the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network. Ms. Burgos is widely recognized for her visionary leadership in the movement to end violence against women, locally and globally. In 2018, Ms. Burgos received a Community Award from the Center Advancing for Domestic Peace, recognizing her leadership and dedication to ending violence against women locally and globally. To those who have worked with her, or received care under her leadership she is simply known as Bea, a source of strength, calm and resilience. In the words of a previous client, Ms. Bea does not just fight for a women’s right to safety but for a women’s right to live her life to the
fullest.
Impact Award Honoree

Cherita Ellens
Women Employed
Cherita Ellens
Cherita Ellens is the President and CEO of Women Employed. A native Chicagoan and longtime advocate for Chicago women, youth, and families, and a working Mom and caregiver.
As President and CEO of Women Employed, Cherita leads an organization that, for nearly five decades, has been dedicated to establishing equity for women in the workforce. From the recent Paid Time Off law and No Salary History, to fair scheduling and protection from workplace harassment, Women Employed has been at the forefront of proposing and enacting policy to improve the economic status and security for women, empowering them to support themselves and their families. Cherita is currently leading the organization’s new strategic plan focused on growing the economic power of women with a particular focus on women in low-wage roles and Black and Latina/x women.
Before joining Women Employed, Cherita led business operations and communications as Executive Vice President for Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, a public-private partnership that works to close the access gap by matching businesses that have unmet hiring needs with qualified, unemployed, and underemployed job seekers. She has also served as the VP of Marketing and Membership for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, and later as the Executive Director of the South Side and Wabash YMCAs where she focused on health disparities in the African-American community.
Cherita currently serves on the City of Chicago’s Advisory Group for the Chicago Resilient Communities Fund: Mayor Lightfoot’s monthly cash assistance pilot within the Chicago Recovery Plan, the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Workforce Access and Equity, the Illinois Board of Higher Education Commission on Equitable Public University Funding, Mayor Lightfoot’s Women’s Advisory Council, the Community Advisory Review Council for the University of Chicago Institute for Translational Medicine, and as a Board member for Family Values at Work. Cherita holds an executive MBA from The University of Notre Dame, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Speech Communications from Illinois State University.
Cherita believes that her purpose is to use her time, talent and treasure helping the most marginalized gain self-sufficiency and full agency over their lives. She is a proud mom of a graduate student studying clinical social work at the University of Chicago, a caregiver to her mother who lives with her, and a grandmother to a pittie named Pepsi.
The Sophia Award

Marcie Love
Marcie Love
Marcie Love has committed much of her life, talents and leadership to improving the lives of women and girls through her unflagging support of reproductive rights. She is the founder of Personal PAC, a bi-partisan political action committee dedicated to preserving abortion rights in Illinois by electing pro-choice candidates to state and local office. Marcie first joined the board of the Chicago Area Planned Parenthood Association in 1966. She went on to co-found the National Abortion Rights Action League in Chicago and the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights.
At the time Love joined Planned Parenthood, the subject of birth control, let alone abortion, was a controversial topic of conversation. One of the main problems with the law banning most abortions was that women of means continued to find ways to obtain the illegal procedure, while poor women were frozen out. Love came to believe legalizing abortion was a matter of fairness and equality and has ever since dedicated her life to the cause.
In 1978, while sitting around her kitchen table with what turned out to be her first board of directors, Love founded Personal PAC. The name derives from the belief that the right to an abortion is a personal freedom. For eleven years until 1989, the PAC sent out pro-choice voters’ guides and raised at most between $5,000 and $10,000 each election cycle.
Then in 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court in the Webster decision ruled that the states could pass legislation limiting access to abortion. Personal PAC rose to the challenge and transformed itself from a kitchen table working group into a professional organization. The board was expanded to increase its diversity. They then hired an executive director and rented office space. Contributions rose dramatically the next election cycle, and have continued to grow strongly since then.
Love, a life-long Republican, comes from a long line of political activists. Her mother was a founder of Republican Women in Pittsburgh, and her great grandmother was a suffragette, who worked to persuade the Daughters of the American Revolution to support a woman’s right to vote. Marcie Love has with her husband, Mike, continued the tradition by raising three politically active daughters: Cathie Love; Anne Marso; and Sara Love. Marcie has been honored a number of times by: NARAL of Illinois, Chicago Women in Philanthropy, Chicago Sun-Times Ten Most Powerful Women in Politics, and The ACLU of Illinois.
Love retired from the Board of Directors in June 2007.
The Founders Award

Melineh Kano
Melineh Kano
Melineh Kano has been with RefugeeOne since 1985 and became its Executive Director in January 2013.
Melineh has overseen the creation, implementation, and evaluation of all RefugeeOne programs and its growth from a 3-person staff to today’s 80+. Additionally, Melineh has been part of developing many national initiatives, such as the creation of HIV/AIDS Medical Case Management for Refugees, and providing technical assistance to newly formed Mutual Aid Associations locally and nationally.
As an Armenian refugee from Iran resettled by RefugeeOne in 1984, she is very passionate about creating a welcoming community for refugees from around the world. She received her degree in Business Management from the University of Rome and is fluent in five languages (Armenian, Farsi, French, Italian and English).
The Vanguard Award

Azariah Baker
Azariah Baker
Azariah Baker (she/her) is a seventeen-year-old artist, activist, and senior at George Westinghouse College Preparatory High School in Chicago. Azariah's poetry has been published in the New York Times. Her photography has been featured in the acclaimed international exhibition, Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility at Express Newark at Rutgers University-Newark. Born and raised in Chicago, Azariah began writing poetry at the early age of five.
Now, her words have won her invitations to collaborate with nonprofit organizations from, By The Hand to the Super Bowl. She has spoken at events and venues across the country, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Project Row in Houston, Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition's annual march, and the Black Girl Freedom Week, an initiative of Grantmakers for Girls of Color.
In 2018, Azariah was selected to join A Long Walk Home's prestigious program, Girl/Friends Leadership Institute, a two-year program that empowers Black girls from Chicago to find their voices and advocate for justice in their school communities and the larger city of Chicago. Her photography and writing are featured in a unique collaborative book; We Sing A Black Girl's Song, created by A Long Walk Home and Netflix in response to Sophia Nahli Allison's Academy Award-nominated documentary, A Love Song of Latasha.
On a national level, Azariah was at the helm of the COVID-19 crisis, speaking on COVID-19's impact on Black girls in the New York Times and co-organizing a fresh produce market with Austin Harvest, which sourced fruit, food, and flowers from local suppliers across Chicago to end food apartheid.
Last year, she was invited to travel overseas as a youth activist; Azariah was the only girl delegate to represent the United States at the 2022 10th annual Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights in Freetown, Sierra Leone; she became the closing keynote speaker of the entire conference. In addition, that summer of 2022, she also participated in Global Glimpse and traveled to Costa Rica to continue developing her skills in agriculture and Spanish.
Azariah currently sits on the board of Flowers for Dreams, is a 2023 Chicago Foundation for Women's Impact grantee, and plans to continue her activism as she attends Spelman College in the Fall of 2023.
The Beacon Award

Natalie Moore
Natalie Moore
Natalie Moore covers segregation and inequality.
Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Natalie’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Natalie is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. Natalie is the author of “The Billboard,” a play about abortion; 16th Street Theater produced the play.
Natalie writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has been published in Essence, Ebony, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. She is the 2017 recipient of Chicago Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award. In 2010, she received the Studs Terkel Community Media Award for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. In 2009, she was a fellow at Columbia College’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, which allowed her to take a reporting trip to Libya. Natalie has won several journalism awards, including a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
Other honors are from the Radio Television Digital News Association (Edward R. Murrow), Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, National Association of Black Journalists, Illinois Associated Press and Chicago Headline Club. The Chicago Reader named her best journalist in 2017. In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from Adler University. In These Times gave her the 2017 Voice of Progressive Journalism Award. Natalie frequently collaborates with Chicago artist Amanda Williams.
She is a 2021 USA Fellow. The Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting. In 2021, University of Chicago Center for Effective Government (CEG), based at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, welcomed her its first cohort of Senior Practitioner Fellows.
Prior to joining WBEZ staff in 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for the Detroit News. She has also been an education reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem.
Natalie has an M.S.J. in Newspaper Management from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She has taught at Columbia College and Medill. She is on the board of Seminary Co-op Bookstore and chair of the Harold Washington Literary Awards.
Special Tribute

Patty Murphy
Patty Murphy, M.S., CDAC, Senior Vice President
- Master’s in criminal social justice, Lewis
- University
- Certified Drug and Alcohol Counselor State of IL
- Private Practice serving individuals with substance use disorders Chicago’s Southwest Side
- ICASA Governing Body and Program Committee voting member
- Member Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence
- Cook County SA Advisory Sexual Assault Advisory Group member.
- Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Committee member
- Proviso Children’s Advocacy Center’s Multidisciplinary Team member.
Patty was a dedicated leader in the effort to bring awareness to domestic and sexual violence. During her 27 years in the movement to educate and eradicate sexual and domestic violence, Patty has helped thousands of women, men, children, and families. She began her career at Pillars Community Health and its predecessor organizations in 1995 and was the guiding force behind building its 24-hour/7 day a week rape crisis center which started with only two staff but now consists of large team of specially
trained therapists, legal/medical advocates, and volunteers servicing five hospitals, six universities, and 30 police departments within the 4th and 5th municipal district courts of Cook County. She operated under the feminist model and was fierce advocate for social justice, equity in everything she did. Patty was a beloved supervisor that mentored and encouraged her staff, the majority of which were young women. Many of these women have gone on to take leadership roles in criminal justice, children’s welfare and advocacy and other professions in harm reduction. She treated everyone with respect and compassion.
Patty’s passion for survivor’s rights drove her to build and reinforce collaboration between law enforcement, criminal courts, hospitals, and schools across Chicagoland to improve their response to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence through cooperative agreements. After working tirelessly in the movement, Patty became Director of Advocacy and Prevention Education.
In 2020 she assumed additional leadership responsibilities as Senior Vice President of Domestic and Sexual Violence and brought together domestic and sexual violence services as a single Line of Service. Patty was cognizant of the vicarious trauma staff would be exposed to and took the initiative to designate a space for self-care and healing and called it the “serenity room.” This room was meticulously decorated by Patty with everything to make all those who came into it feel a sense of calm and peace.
Survivors coming in for counseling or events were also invited to enjoy the space. In addition to her work as a leader in domestic and sexual violence, she was also a credentialed counselor and had a private practice educating individuals on substance misuse, stress reduction and healthy relationships.
Her pride and Joy were her two wonderful children Maggie and Jimmy. She can be quoted by everyone that knows her to say “… my beautiful babies are so precious to me.” She would swell with pride as she mentioned them. During presentations to volunteers or on university campuses she would say “the best decision I ever made was Maggie and Jimmy and the second-best decision was choosing advocacy and the anti-rape movement as my career.”
She is sorely missed by co-workers and colleagues. She joined her mother, in heaven and is deeply missed by her father, five sisters, two brothers and 19 nieces and nephews—her tribe as she called them. She was a cherished friend, and role model to many. She embraced and welcomed the many races, religions, beliefs, sexual identities, and sexual orientations of
people from Chicagoland and its suburbs—and they felt her welcome. She was a model humanitarian and practiced cultural competence and cultural humility. She understood that every voice needed to be heard and understood.
Purchase group/individual seats or sponsorships.
Unable to attend? Consider a contribution.
Selection Committee
Dr. Suzet M. McKinney
Chair
Beatrice Barbareschi
Melissa Flores
Monica George
Nikki Hopewell
Alethia Jackson
Alyssa Knobel
Seri Lee
Kelsey Malnati Howell
Erica Rangel
Evelyn Rodriguez Estrada
Interested in joining the Selection Committee? Contact Jessi Moon at jmoon@cfw.org for more info.