Rochelle Sykes has a zeal for service. 

New Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church has always been home. It is embedded in her history. Baptized at age 11, she remembers always wanting to work in the church office. More than 40 years later, she is an anchor in their ministries. 

Rochelle began working for the church in early-2016 and, shortly thereafter, enrolled in spiritual care and chaplaincy training provided by Rush University Hospital. She expected the training would help her minister to families who were experiencing traumatic losses—of which there are many in West Garfield Park, the neighborhood with the highest rate of fatal and non-fatal shootings in the entire city of Chicago.

“We get a lot of phone calls for help organizing funeral services. Some are very violent crimes.” She describes one woman whose daughter was murdered, who came to the church every day seeking help. “She needed someone to hear her without offering an opinion.” Rochelle listens to what their idea of a perfect home-going service is, to lay their loved ones to rest, and then helps with arrangements.

In September of that year, Rochelle’s nephew Demetrius Griffin was brutally murdered. “He was ripped from me.” She questioned, “did God put me in this position? I could have let that take me out.”  The chaplaincy and spiritual training proved to be important for her self-care, too. In 2019, Demetrius was memorialized in a brilliant stained glass window in the church sanctuary. The Sankofa Peace Window invokes the idea of taking wisdom from the past to build a better future.

Rochelle has since served in leadership roles for New Mt. Pilgrim’s children’s ministry, food kitchen, community block club, Pastor’s Aid Committee, and the Beautiful Seed, a program for young women, among others.

The pandemic heightened needs and traumas of families on the West Side of Chicago; its inequitable impact on communities of color is well-documented. Although the City made equity a primary strategy in response and recovery efforts, the majority of west-side communities scored high in the January 2021 Community Vulnerability Index, which includes cumulative COVID case rates, hospital admissions due to covid, and COVID mortality rate.

Rochelle and the staff at New Mt. Pilgrim were on the front lines: providing PPE to seniors with underlying conditions, mobilizing the Loaves and Fishes food ministry for families experiencing food insecurity, continuing grief counselling as violence ticked upwards in 2020. Sykes says, “People were scared. Many other churches were closed. We had to have a phone that was available 24 hours a day. We were getting calls from people out of state.” Simply by answering the phone, Rochelle let them know that help was available.

Asked what it feels like to help others, Rochelle immediately breaks into a wide grin.

“I have joy in my heart!”  

She often connects her commitment to service with her nephew’s murder. “We’ve been torn apart, but we’ve got a purpose. I have to get up and make this life mean something.”

“It’s now how you fall down, my grandmother said. It’s how you get up.”