Zannah Mustapha emerges finalist as American who cares for the homeless wins CNN Hero Award

Shirley Raines, an American who uses her non-profit Beauty 2 the Streetz outfit to care for the homeless, has been named CNN Hero for 2021.

Raines has been a mainstay on Skid Row for the past six years, providing food, clothing, and hair and makeup services to thousands of people.

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In a report, CNN said every week, Raines and her team of volunteers set up shop and transform part of Skid Row — home to one of America’s largest concentrations of homeless people — into an outdoor beauty salon.

“It’s not so much just giving them makeup or doing their hair, it’s also the physical touch,” Raines was quoted to have said.

“People need physical touch. That’s what was hard when the pandemic hit. We had to stop doing hair, we had to stop doing barber services. And that might be the nicest touch they’ve had all day.”

As she received her award Sunday, Raines thanked her children including her late son, who inspired her work.

“This surely hasn’t been easy. I stand before you a very broken woman,” an emotional Raines said. “I am a mother without a son and there are a lot of people in the streets without a mother — and I feel like it’s a fair exchange.”

Raines was presented with the CNN Hero of the Year award Sunday night by hosts Anderson Cooper and Kelly Ripa. Online voters selected her from among this year’s Top 10 CNN Heroes finalists.

She and the other top 10 CNN Heroes honored at an event all received a $10,000 cash award.

Among those honoured was Nigeria’s Zannah Mustapha, the only African on the list.

The humanitarian, who played a key role in the release of over 100 kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, is the only African on the 10-man list.

In his capacity as the proprietor of Future Prowess Islamic Foundation school, Mustapha has been providing free education to children orphaned by Boko Haram.

Mustapha’s humanitarian gesture has fetched him different laurels.

In 2014, he won “The Unsung Hero” award of Daily Trust. Two years later, he was a finalist of the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award. That same year, he won “World Humanitarian Award”, and in 2017, he got UNHCR’s Annual Nansen Award”.

Mustapha also got Aurora Prize Modern Day Hero Award in 2017.

The CNN Heroes award, which is in its 15th edition, was streamed live for subscribers via CNNgo (CNN.com/go and via CNNgo apps for Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, Samsung Smart TV and Android TV) and on the CNN mobile apps for iOS and Android, on December 13, 2021.

Other CNN Heroes are Jenifer Colpas (Cartagena, Colombia), Lynda Doughty (Phippsburg, ME), David Flink (New York), Patricia Gordon (Los Angeles, CA), and Hector Guadalupe (New York).

Others are Michele Neff Hernandez (Simi Valley, CA), Ala Stanford (Philadelphia, PA), and Made Janur Yasa (Ubud, Bali, Indonesia).