On El Paso’s first scorcher of the season, the community joined together to honor borderland health care workers.
This year’s El Pasoans of the Year event Thursday at Southwest University Park paid tribute to frontline health care heroes after a year when the borderland and the rest of the world were transformed overnight by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Community Spirit Award was given to Susan Goodell, CEO of El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank.
“Our health care heroes – and that includes everyone from environmental services to patient care staff, to nurses and doctors – each of you is a drop in our desert ocean. Without you, we would be empty and dry,” said Tom Fenton, the founder of El Paso Inc. “We will never forget how important you are and the risks you took to get us where we are today.”
The first award presented at the event was the Community Spirit Award, which went to Goodell and for which she received a standing ovation.
Food insecurity skyrocketed as a result of the pandemic and related restrictions, and El Pasoans Fighting Hunger kept up with the intense need for thousands of borderland families.
Under Goodell’s leadership, El Pasoans Fighting Hunger rose in the ranks to become the fourth largest food bank in the United States. She said demand for food during the pandemic rose by more than 430%, and there were days she had worried the food bank would fail. But it never did.
She said it was nothing short of a miracle that her team did not break and continued coming to work despite the heartache.
“What people didn’t see was the frantic efforts behind the scenes the food bank was making on a minute-by-minute basis to find sufficient resources to feed an astounding 123,870 El Pasoans three meals a day every day for the past 16 months,” Goodell said.
The thousands of frontline health care heroes in El Paso were represented by 11 individuals from the region’s hospitals and medical centers, who each received an award from El Paso Inc.
This year’s El Pasoans of the Year event also included a panel discussion led by Stephanie Valle of KVIA Channel 7. The panel included Dr. Alison Days, the immediate past president of the El Paso County Medical Society; Wanda Helgesen, executive director of BorderRAC; and Linda Lawson, group chief nursing officer at The Hospitals of Providence.
Days, a local pediatrician who owns Healthy Days Pediatrics, said that while there were not as many severe COVID-19 cases among children, families were still impacted by the illnesses or deaths of other loved ones.
“What I did see is several of my patients’ families lose members, kids losing grandparents, parents – people I had spent time with over the years and known for up to 15 or 20 years,” Days said. “That was hard.
“We also saw how it affected children not in schools and the educational loss, and things surrounding the anxiety, depression and abuse that increased during this time.”
Helgesen said one of the things BorderRAC does is hold exercises to help the region’s health care system prepare for disasters.
“The goal of the exercises is actually to break the system,” Helgesen said. “Interestingly we did a COVID exercise in late February or early March of last year and every single inject we gave the hospitals to break them came to pass – every single one, whether it was staffing or supplies or the schools closing.”
Lawson described the ways nurses were impacted through the pandemic and the ways they were able to persist through the dark days.
“Nurses have caring hearts – it’s really everybody in the health care field – they have caring hearts. They are kind and compassionate. They are there during the best times when babies are born and during the most difficult times,” Lawson said. “This was certainly one of the most difficult times.”
Thursday’s event was kicked off by a rendition of God Bless America, sung by Linda Wolfe, president and executive director of the Great Khalid Foundation and the mother of Khalid, the R&B star.
El Paso Inc. also announced it is co-producing a short film with the El Paso Community Foundation that will highlight the sacrifices made by local health care workers during the pandemic. A sneak peek was shown at the event, and the finished film will be shown during the Plaza Classic Film Festival. Health care workers in the audience were invited after the program onto the field to film special footage.
The film is being made by Ellie Ann Fenton, a cinematographer originally from El Paso.
El Paso Inc. also announced a $5,000 donation to El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank.
Each year since 1996, El Paso Inc. has asked its readers and past honorees to nominate people who have gone above and beyond their job descriptions to make a difference in this community. The El Pasoan of the Year award goes to the individual or group who has done the most over the past year to make the community a better place.
This year’s event sponsors included WestStar Bank, Mattress Firm, El Paso Electric, Marathon Petroleum and Hunt Companies. The city of El Paso sponsored free tickets for health care workers, and the county sponsored T-shirts for them.
June 13, 2021 at 01:00PM
http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/local_news/we-must-never-forget/article_0aef3ac8-cbdb-11eb-a023-cf7187750e51.html
'We must never forget' | Local News | elpasoinc.com - El Paso Inc.
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