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3 minute read
Eric Gallagher
By ALLISON SELK
Shaw Media correspondent
Shenon Bone described her sister, Erin Gallagher, as “a force.”
“It’s just her wiring,” Bone said.
Gallagher, an unincorporated Manhattan Township resident, grew up in a single-parent home in Joliet. Even though supplies were slim, she watched her mother give to other single mothers in need.
“We were raised with awareness of community,” Bone said. “The only time we were in trouble is if we were thoughtless of someone else, we were not allowed to be remiss.”
Gallagher took these lessons she learned as a child and volunteered as an adult. But when the pandemic began to affect the communities she called home, she used her public relations and culinary strengths to support her neighbors in a big way.
“My day job is networking, so I used my business skills for humanity to network,” Gallagher said.
She started a Facebook page called Manhattan Strong Illinois as a hyperlocal effort for people to post needs and offer donations. The group grew, and she watched as people in the area swapped, asked for and offered help.
“There is no shame in a pandemic,” Gallagher said of the site’s success. “This community worked very hard to keep people fed, clothed and safe.”
Gallagher said she used her kitchen as a “war room” to feed the hungry. She fed one to five families out of her home every week, and dinners were catered to a physician’s office in a Chicago-based hospital for six weeks through a connection she made in her daughter’s Brownie troop. She baked turkey, ham and side dishes for Christmas meals and delivered to the elderly, homebound and those in hardship.
A former high school classmate reached out after his father passed and asked Gallagher to make a food tray for his mother, someone she had not seen in 30 years but who had volunteered at Joliet Central, where Gallagher attended. “I stood in the driveway and talked to her, she was a giant in my eyes,” Gallagher recalled.
Her kitchen also became a bakery as homemade pies, cookies, brownies and treats of all kinds flooded her countertops. She passed them out to delivery drivers, the elderly and veterans. She prepped them for birthday parties in exchange for donations to a food pantry and swapped treats for fresh produce from local farms, also to be given to food pantries.
Gallagher made connections with food pantries and local farmers to portion food where it was needed most. She drove milk, produce and meat all over Chicagoland to ensure nothing was wasted.
To her, yes, she fed people, but there was another layer within her mission: to make a human connection in a shelter-in-place situation where people suffered physically, financially and also mentally.
During the pandemic, the Girl Scout troop she led for five years asked for fabric donations. The girls bought elastic with the earned cookie money and the girls, mothers and grandmothers made 600 masks to donate out of 25 bags of fabric.
She asked for donations of unused school supplies, and 35 families came through. She collected 400 books for parents who home-schooled or managed virtual school. She distributed supplies and treats to veterans’ homes, facilitated donations to schools with high poverty rates, cooked meals for a widow, checked in on friends and called the police for a friend in mental anguish. And the list goes on.
“The need is so great, the people who need help are the people next door, right in front of us. We don’t need to travel to a third-world country to find need,” Gallagher said. “People are right next to us.”
Gallagher remembers a “tremendous compliment” from her sister.
“She said, ‘God puts you in positions where he needs you, and you step up every time.’”