Marcus Rashford leads Queen's Honours List - alongside coronavirus heroes

Covid-19 heroes dominate the Queen's Birthday Honours this year, from famous faces such as Marcus Rashford and Joe Wicks to hundreds of key workers who have helped with Britain's fight against coronavirus.

This year's list was postponed from June in order to include people, such as medical workers, fundraisers and volunteers, who have been instrumental in the Covid-19 effort.

It celebrates the selfless good deeds of big names as well as ordinary people during the pandemic, which saw delivery drivers drop off food and medicine to vulnerable people and health and care workers put themselves at risk to help their communities and beyond.

Among them is footballer Marcus Rashford, who has been made an MBE after his heroic efforts in ensuring no child went hungry over the summer period during the pandemic.

His campaign forced the Government to make a U-turn over its free school meals provision and now he is being honoured for services to vulnerable children in the UK during Covid-19.

Marcus Rashford MBE

The Manchester United star is being honoured after his efforts in ensuring no child went hungry over the summer period during the pandemic.

22 year old Rashford successfully lobbied the Government into a U-turn over its free school meals policy during lockdown, ensuring children in need would receive meals across the summer.

The England forward has since formed a child food poverty task force, linking up with some of the nation's biggest supermarkets and food brands.

During September, Rashford received the Professional Footballers' Association merit award for his efforts.

Speaking at the time, the United forward said: "What we've done so far it's only a short-term answer.

"Me and my team behind me are just trying to find plans on how we can help these children for the rest of their childhood really, to find long-term answers to the problem.

"At the moment we don't have the answers, but we'll do our best to try to find them and to progress the situation that they are in at the moment the best we can.''

Kathryn Davies MBE

Bank employee Kathryn Davies from Manchester is being honoured for services to the community in Greater Manchester during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kathryn has worked at the Cooperative Bank for more than 30 years, supporting the bank’s customers who find themselves in more complex financial situations.

But during the early part of lockdown, she went over and above in helping customers stuck abroad and needing repatriation. She single handedly dealt with many priority cases ensuring customers had access to cash and were able to reach positions of safety following disruption in the travel industry with bookings and refunds.

Kathryn has helped colleagues in other parts of the bank as the public’s needs changed in response to the pandemic. She helped to register many more customers on to digital services so they did not need to leave their homes, notably the elderly.

She volunteered to support NHS workers and patients across the country by organising and distributing care package donations from the bank’s employees. Care packages were sent to many hospitals across the UK including Greater Manchester, Ormskirk, Stoke, Macclesfield, Tameside, Preston, Stirling and Carmarthenshire. (roughly 400 packages)

These care packages received great feedback from the hospitals concerned as they were tailored to help the specific needs of those locations and included refreshments, toiletries, iPads and walkie-talkies to help patient and NHS worker communication.

Peter Harding MBE

40 years old Peter Harding from Whitefield is being honoured for services to Critical National Infrastructure during the Covid-19 response.

Working shifts at all hours of the day, he personally stepped up to the challenge of managing over 1,200 COVID-19 network connections within a 3 month period, including sites of Critical National Infrastructure (Nightingale Hospitals, schools) to ensure the country was connected and able to respond to the pandemic.

Peter was an essential part of the TalkTalk Business team, delivering hundreds of key services and maintaining their connections.

He supported upgrades and new connections across the whole country including; 188 Food Distribution (Tesco Click and Collect) and logistic providers, 81 GP surgeries, 222 Schools and 41 NHS Care Homes.

He took the initiative to create a new Covid-19 process for prioritising resources and connections. This was designed to match the Government's criteria for critical sites and those which needed to be prioritised.

This quick response to create a new process vastly accelerated decision-making and speed of delivery, and was crucial to enabling TalkTalk to move quickly to support vulnerable customers.

He was on call 24/7 throughout the immediate period to ensure the smooth running of new processes.

Gareth Mallion MBE

**Network Rail employee Gareth Mallion is being honoured for his services to the NHS.**

Gareth played an integral role in the creation of the NHS Nightingale Hospital in Manchester. He volunteered for this role, which is completely outside of his normal job, and provided key logistical support to get the hospital ready to receive patients.

Through long hours of work, often working through the weeks and weekends without a break, he was able to set up all the logistics systems for the hospital and managed all the deliveries.

He set up and managed the stores systems for the hospital, drawing on his knowledge from his job. He arranged the storage of all the equipment on the site and managed the offsite storage of hospital equipment at the Network Rail warehouse at Warrington.

The NHS Nightingale Manchester was able to open less than three weeks after work began, providing 750 extra beds for the North West region.

Pat Mayle MBE

Support Leader Pat Mayle from Eccles is being awarded for services to Girlguiding and to the covid-19 response.

Pat has been a committed Girlguiding volunteer for over 50 years. She has held a number of roles such as County President for guiding in Greater Manchester West (Salford and Trafford) and heads the county awards committee that ensures Girlguiding volunteers are acknowledged and recognised.

Pat’s service to the NHS as a Girlguiding volunteer began in 2015, following an idea she had following the loss of her husband - she was struck by the kindness of the staff at Salford Royal hospital following her late husband’s emergency admission when she was given a ‘comfort bag’ so she could stay by her husband’s side (this bag contained what she needed to stay with him).

She later met a Bereavement Specialist nurse at the hospital who put together these ‘comfort bags’ and learned that funding for the initiative was limited and that sewing the bags and collecting the donations all relied on the hospital staff.

Pat saw an opportunity for Girlguiding to help. In just the first year, Girlguiding had packed and distributed nearly 1,000 all sewn, made-up and donated by girls and young women in guiding.

The bags contain hotel-sized toiletries and a small notebook and pen.

A network of guiding units across seventeen counties in the North West support the scheme, making bags and donations. They have now made over 18,000.

Other guiding volunteers across the UK are now keen to replicate it with their local hospitals.

Pat attends various conferences and study days for medical staff to raise awareness of the scheme and to speak about improving bereavement care and the SWAN bereavement model.

Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, Pat has worked intensively to promote the scheme both in Girlguiding and in local hospitals and has adapted the scheme to directly benefit the NHS staff who are working tirelessly at this time.

She has delivered 2,600 bags to hospitals over the North West through her network of volunteers and units and, for NHS staff, started to include over 700 treat bags (hand cream, coffee sachets, sweets, hand sanitiser, cans of drink) for NHS staff as well as 1,000 laundry bags for them to store their scrubs prior to washing.

In the North West, the comfort bags have also supported refugees in the area, women staying in refuges and victims and relatives of the Manchester Arena attack. The team sent provisions to those impacted by the Grenfell Tower fire in liaison with the Good Grief Trust.

Leon Mundell MBE

Charity worker Leon Mundell is being honoured for services to the community in Greater Manchester during the Covid-19 response.

He is a long time care charity worker who, when the Coronavirus lockdown caused the charity to cease operations, personally took over the provision of several of the charity’s vital services.

The African Caribbean Care Group (ACCG), established in 1983, is a registered charity providing Health and Social care support to, and working to alleviate social isolation and loneliness of, older adults of African and Caribbean descent in Manchester, Trafford, Salford and Stockport.

As part of this service, the charity provides regular contact, practical and emotional support to both the people being cared for and their families, meals on wheels, and social events such as board games and craft sessions, luncheon clubs and monthly outings with a view to mitigating social isolation.

He has worked for the charity for over 21 years.

As the ACCG has been closed during the Coronavirus crisis, he continued to work from home, delivering homemade meals to the service users' homes, whilst also cheering them up with his singing and jokes at their door, providing important moments of contact for people who are already lonely and isolated and many of whom, due to their age, are now part of the at-risk shielding group.

In order to preserve some of this sense of community, in addition to his food deliveries, he has called each elderly individual looked after by the service every few days to check in, cheer them up and ask if they are in need of anything.

He has helped with gardening, cooking, shopping for food and essentials, and delivering them items they need.

Michele Nel MBE

Volunteer Michele Nel is being honoured for services to the community and frontline workers in Wigan during Covid-19.

Michele has volunteered for over 20 years donating thousands of hours. During Covid-19 a midwife asked if she could make headbands to stop sore and bleeding ears caused by elasticated face masks. She immediately sought volunteers to help and started Headbands for Heroes.

The group has grown to 99 sewers, four administrators and 73 couriers who have made and delivered over 13,000 headbands nationally to key workers.

She mobilised local businesses to donate supplies. She started and runs Handmade, a multinational (Somalia, Iran, India, South Africa, UK) voluntary group which addresses isolation and breaks down integration barriers through teaching sewing skills and uplifting open conversation.

She bought and refurbished dozens of sewing machines, to donate to the group and members, enabling participants to sew at home. She encourages participants to progress to take an active role in running the group.

She also co-facilitates Good Yarn twice a week, a similar group which supports women who have experienced trauma or have mental health issues.

Recognising that immigrants and refugees struggle to integrate into the community, she hosted community house parties to break down barriers, translation services to enable access to church services and activities, helping them to practice their English.

She volunteers much of her time to her local Wigan church community, where she has played a significant role in enabling recent arrivals into the UK to access church services and integrate into the community (for example, through translation services); donating meals and administering an initiative to provide new parents in need with meals for two weeks.

She creates free to access tutorials on diverse topics including sewing techniques, refurbishing sewing machines, and handcream making.

She blogs about her experience as a wheelchair user to encourage others to overcome their perceptions of limitation. She has spent hundreds of hours responding to other wheelchair users to answer questions, encourage them, and share experiences and tips.

Julia Taylor MBE

Urology Nurse at Salford Royal Julia Taylor is being honoured for services to the NHS during the pandemic.

Julia has made an extraordinary contribution to Nursing, the speciality of urology nursing and service to the NHS over her 40 year career.

She has developed and contributed to a number of national projects related to nurse led initiatives in urology services, actively driving a project reducing the incidence of catheter associated urinary tract infection (CaUTI) rates within her organisation.

The project currently demonstrates 10 years of data showing a sustained patients’ improvement and a reduction in death rates.

She served a 4 year term as President of the British Association of Urology Nurses, using it as a platform to drive the nursing agenda, to improve care and standards for those undergoing urology treatment.

During the first wave of Covid-19, Julia made it her mission to ensure patients requiring on-going urology treatment have continued. She developed a triage system to ensure new patients to the service where prioritised and received a consultation.

Many nurse led clinics were successfully converted to telephone or videoconference clinics. Some cancer clinics were maintained to ensure vulnerable patients had emotional support during this worrying time and symptoms were managed.

She supported other areas by redeploying her own team to critical care areas and provided daily catch up with her teams to ensure their own emotional health and wellbeing through these extraordinary times.

Through the recovery phase Julia’s attention to detail in remapping the patient pathways making them covid secure has led to the speedy reintroduction of care to people who require urology services, many of whom are newly diagnosed with cancer or require on-going cancer management.

Qaisra Shahraz MBE

Qaisra Shahraz is founder, Curator and Executive Director of the Muslim Arts and Culture Festival. She's being honoured for services to Gender Equality and Cultural Learning.

Qaisra is a prize-winning and critically-acclaimed novelist, scriptwriter, peace and gender activist, who has dedicated her life to literature, education, gender rights and community cohesion. The author of 5 novels, her work centers on the stories of women from societies where their narratives and voices are very rarely heard.

Her work has been translated into several languages and is read the world over, most notably, her book Holy Woman has been a best-seller in Indonesia for the last 15 years.

She has worked in the Education sector spanning across 30 years, including 19 years with Ofsted and more recently working on adult education on life- long learning.

Her work in this area has inspired many young women and girls who have spoken highly of her impact on their own self-confidence.

More recently, as the founder and executive director of MACFEST, she has had an unparalleled impact in the world of arts and culture as it relates to diversity and inclusion.

Internationally award-winning MACFEST festivals held over 50 MACFEST events in just 9 days in 2018, reaching thousands of people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, her contribution to promoting community cohesion and cross-cultural learning cannot be overstated.

As a first of its kind and ground-breaking festival MACFEST brought together several colleges and schools in Manchester to embark on their own journey of cultural discovery. This can be seen no more clearly than with the likes of Levenshulme School for Girls which ran their own event on ‘Past Muslim Scientists’ ‘ not only encouraging STEM subjects, but also empowering the girls with promoting greater understanding of their own heritage.

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