Celebrating CDEL’s 2025 Winter Awards Benefit Award Winners
This year, we are proud to recognize our Volunteer of the Year, Partner of the Year, and Impact Award Winners. Learn more about the awards and award winners below.
2025 CDEL Volunteer of the Year:
The CDEL Volunteer of the Year Award honors a volunteer, organization or law firm who shows a strong commitment to CDEL’s mission by providing an extraordinary level of direct pro bono legal or supportive services to its clients and achieves results that benefit the client and/or the community of low-income seniors and people with disabilities throughout Cook County.
Valerie Chu, Connection
Valerie Chu was first connected with CDEL through the Chinese American Service League (CASL). Valerie served as a Mandarin and Cantonese interpreter for CDEL’s Power of Attorney Workshops with CASL in 2019. As a law student at University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, Valerie later interned with CDEL during 2023. Valerie quickly gravitated towards CDEL’s guardianship work, and she began staffing CDEL’s Guardianship Help Desk that had recently reopened for in-person appointments at the Daley Center. When Valerie’s time as an intern came to end, she continued to volunteer with CDEL’s Guardianship Help Desk, and to provide direct representation to CDEL clients. Valerie has continued to assist CDEL with outreach, offering to give outreach presentations in Mandarin with community partners including Pui Tak Center and Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC) reaching over 100 people. For these presentations Valerie translated documents, helped organize the events, trained interpreters, called all the clients with reminders, recruited attorneys and attended the workshop. Valerie has truly gone above and beyond and has devoted over 300 hours of volunteer services to CDEL.
Learn more about previous award winners here: CDEL Volunteer of the Year
2025 CDEL Partner of the Year Award Winner:
The CDEL Partner of the Year Award honors a corporation and/or law firm that has provided exceptional assistance and volunteer support to CDEL and its clients.
Venable LLP
Venable LLP launched its Chicago office at the end of 2020 and has quickly become a strong partner of CDEL. Over the past two years, Venable LLP has contributed to CDEL through its Foundation, pro bono volunteerism, and participation on CDEL’s Board of Directors.
Former Life Director Erin Maus joined Venable LLP at the end of 2022 and immediately connected CDEL with its charitable foundation that began funding CDEL in 2023. This past year the firm began volunteering with CDEL’s Power of Attorney Workshops and Housing Preservation Project. Fifteen Venable attorneys have volunteered with CDEL, an especially impressive number given that this number reflects almost one half of Venable’s attorneys in the Chicago office. The volunteers served twenty-four CDEL clients in 2023 alone. Jeremy Goldkind, a Venable LLP Partner, joined CDEL’s Board of Directors in 2024 and currently serves on the Nominating Committee.
Learn more about previous award winners here: CDEL Partner of the Year
2025 CDEL Impact Award Winners:
The CDEL Impact Award recognizes a volunteer, law firm, organization, coalition or corporation that has developed an initiative, program or services that profoundly impacts the lives of senior citizens and people with disabilities in Cook County.
BCBS Blue Door Neighborhood Centers, Center on Halsted, RUSH’s Regional Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Solutions for Care
The 2025 Impact Award recognizes four of CDEL’s most important thought partners in the development of our new project focused on advanced legal planning in 2024. The Power of Planning is funded by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and is focused on providing culturally connective outreach and legal representation of individuals with an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Under the grant, CDEL is responsible for creating materials that will be accessible statewide to members of the Black American, Hispanic/Latinx American, and LGBT+ communities living with dementia and their caregivers.
The Impact Award Winners have made and continue to make invaluable contributions to the development and launch of the Power of Planning. Solutions for Care, a long-time partner of CDEL, knows first-hand the importance of advanced planning for seniors. They hosted the bilingual pilot of our Latino/Hispanic module at their North Riverside offices. Center on Halsted, also a long-time partner of CDEL, was essential in the development of culturally relevant and affirming programming for the LGBT+ community. We launched the pilot of our Power of Planning LGBT+ module at their office in Lakeview. BCBS Blue Door Neighborhood Centers, a new community partner of CDEL, made an immense effort to coordinate the launch of the Power of Planning’s Black American module in Morgan Park and Pullman, communities of historic impact on the South Side of Chicago. And finally, staff from Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center generously shared their expertise and were instrumental in making community connections to help the Power of Planning flourish. The professional and person-centered input from RADC informed our understanding of memory loss, the current state of dementia treatment and what specific needs our community members face. CDEL is incredibly grateful to these four community partners!
Learn more about previous award winners here: CDEL Impact Award