Kudos | October 2017

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October 2017 View more

Help for Houston
Several Naperville organizations and businesses responded to the needs of millions affected by Hurricane Harvey. Sullivan’s Steakhouse contributed twenty percent of Labor Day weekend sales to Houston-area food banks, and the Naperville Jaycees collected donations at the Last Fling. Naper Nuts & Sweets donated fifty percent of one-day popcorn sales, and the Rotary Club of Naperville partnered with Mesón Sabika in a matching program throughout September.

Charity Harvest
Sweet Corn for Charity plants and harvests about 67,000 pounds of sweet corn for the state’s food banks each year, the largest single donation to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. All seeds, land and labor are donated by the organization’s partners, including Monsanto and Pioneer.

Out of the Woods
St. Charles-based Clarke has donated $23,333 to the Friends of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. The money will fund the two-year process of removing invasive or exotic plants such as honeysuckle and buckthorn in an effort to protect native trees and plants at Belleau Woods in Wheaton.

On Board
Little Friends recently welcomed seven new board members including (from left to right) Anthony Losurdo (Gibson’s Restaurant Group), Ushaben Chavda (Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine), Karla Harmon (Jones Lang LaSalle), Eric Jones (Lewis University) and Kevin Kobe (john greene Commercial). Not pictured are Chris Finck (TreeHouse Foods) and Mark Wright (Diverse Facility Solutions).

Best Friends
The Education Center will honor Tom Carroll (Kids’ Best Friend Award) along with Thomas and Kathleen O’Donnell (George and Pat Pradel Humanitarian Award) and local Rotary Clubs (Making a Difference Award) at its annual Kids’ Best Friend Benefit on October 20.

Caring for Kids
Young patients transferring from Elmhurst Hospital to the pediatric intensive care unit at Edward Hospital will begin receiving welcome bags through a program coordinated by Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland & Northern Indiana.  The comfort items include a blanket, stuffed animal, crayons and a coloring book for the patient and toiletries and notecards for the parents. Local Girl Scouts donated the fleece blankets, and leadership trainees at McDonald’s Hamburger University in Oak Brook stuffed the bags and included a personal note of encouragement.   

Hospital Board
Mina Setork, a resident of Naperville and co-founder, co-owner and chief financial officer of DynaCom Management, Inc., has been named to the Edward Foundation Board of Trustees.

Warm Welcome
Naper Settlement has unveiled plans for a new 3,200-square-foot welcome center, Heritage Gateway, that will become the hub of the museum campus. The prairie-style building will serve guests for entry and orientation into the museum, and will house the center’s crescent-shaped Innovation Hall. “We do a really good job of telling our nineteenth-century history,” says CEO and President Macarena Tamayo-Calabrese, “but we don’t have a place to house 66,000 artifacts and stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The building’s centerpiece will be an interactive 3-D digital wall that can be explored by theme, timeline or artifact. Visitors will be able to add to a living archive by uploading their own stories, reflections and images to the wall. A 2019 groundbreaking has been planned.

School Pride
The Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy has been ranked number five on the niche.com 2018 Best Public High Schools in America. The Aurora-based residential school offers rigorous college prep courses, all taught at the honors level.