Time & Leisure magazine launched its Community Hero Awards in the summer of 2020 to recognise the extraordinary individuals who had stepped up across South West London and Surrey during the pandemic. Readers were asked to nominate those who had made a difference. The response was overwhelming.
Among the nominees, Syebvonne Nguyen stood apart. Reader after reader described the same thing: a woman who co-founded Community Champions with Nisha Thiru, mobilised volunteers to provide more than 2,600 masks and care packages to hospitals and care homes, set up a network of mask trees that had bloomed across multiple boroughs, and was still going — still sewing, still delivering, still showing up.
The judges awarded Syebvonne the top Community Hero prize. Other winners that year included Nichola Green of the Rose & Crown, who provided 6,000 meals to NHS workers, and Katy Kenyon, who co-founded Sewing4Kingston and mobilised 1,500 volunteers to make 40,000 items of PPE. South West London, it turned out, had a remarkable number of people who simply decided to help.
For Little A.R.K., the award was an early external validation of something Syebvonne had never needed validated: that the community was the resource. That fabric, time, and care — given freely — could travel further than any funded initiative.
“I am very honoured. The forest of community mask trees had grown bigger and reaching wider communities. Blooming hundreds of masks each day to serve the people.”
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