Announcing 2023 Denise Stennis Awardees and Honorable Mentions

The award symbolizes our hope that due recognition will inspire and ignite human potential and galvanize philanthropic and community leaders, educators, policymakers, and professionals to keep taking the steps to advance racial equity in the field.  In particular, we hope to embolden BIPOC community members and students to pursue careers and leadership in the field of nonprofit, philanthropy, and fundraising.

Bessie Alcantara is executive director of Alternatives, Chicago’s leading provider of Restorative Justice and Behavioral Health services and capacity-building for schools and organizations. Bessie has over a decade of experience working with youth serving organizations. Through her executive leadership experience across multiple organizations, she has cultivated strong expertise in strategic planning, racial equity work, fund development, program evaluation, and quality improvement. She specializes in creating culturally responsive centers of care for young people and deeply nurturing work environments that recognize the need to cultivate and retain diverse staff, representative of the communities they serve.

As a bilingual, first generation Salvadoran-Mexican American and Chicago native, Bessie is passionate about dismantling systemic racism and advocating for trauma-informed care and restorative justice programming for young Black and Brown Chicagoans. Throughout her career, Bessie has focused on centering young peoples’ voices in innovative nonprofit program design.

Bessie currently serves on the Illinois Opioid Remediation Advisory Board Workforce Development & Infrastructure Working Group. She also serves on the Chicago Strategic Action Committee as a steering committee member.

In 2021, Bessie served on the CSUP Collaborative Steering Committee and Illinois State Board of Education Whole Child Task Force. In addition, she was a 2020 McCormick Fellow, a Multicultural

Leadership Academy Fellow (2016-2017), and a Barbara Bowman Leadership Fellow (2016-2017) (Policy). Prior to this, she served as a member of Lurie’s Strengthening Chicago Youth Juvenile Justice Collaborative (2017), the Greenheart International Fundraising Committee and Advisory Committee (2014-2017) and a Program Team Co-Chair of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center Collaborative.

Bessie received her Bachelor's Degree in Communications from DePaul University and her Master’s in Social Work in Leadership & Development in Social Services from Loy

Blacks In Green is an environmental justice and economic development non-profit organization that serves as a bridge and catalyst among communities and their stakeholders in the design and development of green, self-sustaining, mixed-income, walkable-villages within Black neighbourhoods

The United Nations lists the Rohingya Muslims of northwestern Burma (Myanmar) among the most persecuted people in the world. Burma’s 1982 Citizenship Law denied the ethnic minority Muslim group legal status, rendering them stateless, and denying them the right education, work, and travel. Since then, many of the Rohingya have been displaced by ethnic violence and have been forced to flee the persecution.

The Rohingya Culture Center was established in 2016, in Chicago’s West Ridge/West Rogers Park neighborhood, to serve the needs of the growing Rohingya refugee community. As many as 600 Rohingya families have been resettled in Chicago since 2010.

The need for such a center, which could provide social services for the growing community, was first conceptualized by Nasir Zakaria, the Center’s current Executive Director, and one of the first Rohingya refugees to arrive in Chicago. RCC opened on April 9, 2016. Since then, the number of programs and the number of constituents has only grown.

The Center is partially funded by a grant from the Zakat Foundation.

Diane Latiker is a community activist in Chicago. Latiker is the founder of the nonprofit, Kids Off the Block (KOB), which provides recreational activities and educational opportunities for young people in Chicago, focusing on the neighborhood of Roseland.

In 2010, Darnell joined ACT as a volunteer, helping the organization improve its technology and business operations. It wasn’t long after that he was offered a full-time position moving him from IT to Director of Operations and in 2016, the board nominated him to become the Executive Director of ACT. Throughout his time at ACT, Darnell has been able to galvanize hundreds of organizations and community leaders to take on Austin’s challenges with passion and commitment. In 2022, ACT was named Nonprofit Of The Year by the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Chicago as a result of ACT’s excellence, accomplishments, leadership, and community impact.

Under his leadership, ACT has helped the Austin community become a United Way Neighborhood Network, where ACT leads a community hub initiative to develop a referral network of service providers that will help maximize social supports for Austin residents. ACT has also led an unprecedented effort in partnership with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC Chicago) to bring together over 500 Austin community stakeholders to design and publish ‘Austin Forward. Together.’ (AFT) the Austin community’s first-ever quality-of-life plan. The plan is a five-year comprehensive strategy comprised of 23 strategies and 80+ actions to address seven issue areas identified by the community: Community Narrative, Economic Development, Education, Housing, Public Safety, Youth Empowerment, and Civic Engagement. READ MORE

Antonio Gutierrez , pronouns they/them, is an undocumented anti-displacement community organizer who has lived in Chicago for over 20 years. They are one of the co-founders and current Strategic Coordinator for Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). As a community organizer, they have organized direct actions, community forums, national convenings, and understands the importance of organizing and developing directly impacted individuals to achieve social justice. Gutierrez has 10 years of non-profit administration & development experience, a degree in Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and is also a co-founder and organizer of the Albany Park Defense Network, La Guayabita Autonoma Community Garden and the Autonomous Tenants Union

The Musical Arts Institute was incorporated January, 2010.  The founder and Executive Director is Bassist and Music Educator, Michael Manson. Having enjoyed 35 years of career success with artists such as George Duke, Al Jareau, Kirk Whallum, and many others, Mike felt a need to give back to his Chicago home where role models were not accessible for many of our youth. 

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Working together with co-founder and Co-Executive Director, Lana Manson, the couple has organized an amazing team of professional musicians/educators to provide outstanding music instruction in Chicago's under served areas.

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Both Mike and Lana are graduates of Northwestern University (Bienen School of Music) and have a cumulative total of more than 30 years of experience in Music Education. The team established the school’s home office on March 20, 2010 at 9244 South Lafayette in Chicago, Illinois. Noting that students within CPS and other highly populated African American communities lacked access to the advanced music instruction, the founders sought to establish an organization to equip students to compete for college scholarships and/or students for sustainable professional careers in music.

Austin Coming Together (ACT  is dedicated to providing backbone support for a 50+ network of non-profit, faith-based, public, and private entities. Through an approach called collective impact, they facilitate collaboration to achieve more, together.