The 2023 Landmarks Illinois Influencers will be honored at PRESERVATION FORWARD on March 2, 2023, at the Old Post Office in Chicago. Through their work, these five leaders have shaped Illinois’ built environment and are joining Landmarks Illinois to move the preservation movement forward.
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During his more than 24 years leading the nonprofit Chicago Community Loan Fund (CCLF), Calvin L. Holmes has helped make reuse of our historic places accessible for all Chicagoans. CCLF provides responsible financing and technical assistance for community stabilization and development efforts, including historic preservation projects, that benefit the city’s low- to moderate-income neighborhoods.
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Entrepreneur Amy Mills is preserving and celebrating Southern Illinois’ food culture while also reusing historic places. Her Murphysboro-based restaurant businesses are bringing people together and creating community and economic development in a region that has experienced depopulation and disinvestment.
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Related is a national leader in reusing historic places to create quality affordable housing. Through its work, the Chicago-based developer is not only saving places from our past but preserving local culture and helping create thriving communities where people are proud to live and want to visit and open businesses.
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Through her urban design and research practice, BORDERLESS, and Creative Grounds Initiative, Paola Aguirre Serrano is actively invested in spatial justice by bringing more people into the preservation processes, and empowering communities to have a voice in how historic places in their neighborhoods are reimagined. Her exemplary community-led design processes are helping to redefine how places are preserved and for whom.
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Amanda Williams, an artist who trained as an architect, uses historic buildings as a backdrop for her thought-provoking, large-scale art installations that focus on the complex role race has on how we value places. Her work imaginatively activates the possibility of vacant landscapes while also calling attention to the erasure of culture and community due to systemic racism and underinvestment, particularly in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods.
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