Fab5 2022 winners receive ‘glowing’ 5-star reviews

Late last year, nominations opened for the 7th Annual Fab5 Awards, and just three months later, the winners have been announced. The winners are Michael Wilber, Business Leader of the Year; Tess MacQueen, Entrepreneur of the Year; Gavin Mosley, Rookie of the Year; Meryl Phipps, Not-for-Profit Leader of the Year; and Hei Hei Depew, Volunteer of the Year.

According to a recent press release, the Annual Fab5 Awards “highlight and celebrate the achievements of young professionals who are excelling in their fields and making an impact in Tompkins County.” A free virtual award ceremony to celebrate the winners is scheduled for March 7 at 7 p.m. Register at tinyurl.com/yd5qxvlm.

The Fab5 awards are sponsored by Tompkins Trust Company, Communiqué Design & Marketing, Cayuga Health and the Triad Foundation in partnership with the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce. This year’s theme — “5-Star Reviews” — encouraged residents to nominate those for whom they would leave a “glowing five-star review,” according to the release.

Last year’s Fab5 Awards was the first of the pandemic, with several changes made in light of those circumstances (see tinyurl.com/yb6x69vn). The format of the award ceremony was changed to virtual, and the number of award recipients was increased to seven, with two added categories for Above and Beyond and Essential Worker of the Year.

This year, the virtual format is the same, but the number of awards is back down to its original five.

“With the planning purposes — we have to plan so many months in advance — we just were unsure of the safety of having the event in person,” explained Jessie White, Fab5 Planning Committee chair and 2019 Volunteer of the Year winner. “So, we decided to make the call that it would just be the best for everyone to do another virtual event.”

White said that the winners list this year was especially difficult to narrow down.

“They had some tough calls,” she said. “I was on the call with the judges and I told them, ‘I don’t envy being in your position.’ There were some really great candidates, and they had to do some tough narrowing down a lot of times.”

While all the winners come from different sorts of professions, they all come with that “glowing review” that the organizers were looking for when nominations were announced.

Wilber, the taproom general manager at Ithaca Beer Company, has worked with Ithaca Beer for a little over four years. Over that time, Wilber has helped the business navigate the pandemic, expanding its offerings to adapt to whatever challenges got thrown its way. And now, with Ithaca Beer planning to open a new location soon, he’s looking forward to continuing to lead the business throughout 2022.

Wilber said that in his role at Ithaca Beer, he sees himself as the “ringleader” trying to “organize chaos.”

“Each day is completely different from the last,” he said. “And it’s just making sure that, not just the guests that come through the doors, but also the staff have the best experience that they could have that day. So, whatever you have to do to make that happen.”

His efforts have been well appreciated by his coworkers, who were there to cheer him on when he got the news.

“I was at the brewery, and that day … I was like, ‘I’ll get out early,’” Wilber said. “Once I did, it was kind of a group effort between multiple people at the brewery to keep me there and keep me at work longer than I planned. And they were just like, ‘Can you just sit over here for a moment?’ … Then I looked out the window and I saw someone in a panda suit and some balloons. I had no idea what was going on at that point. But it was awesome finding out what exactly was going down.”

Like Wilber, Mosley, program manager for government and community relations at NYSEG, is proud of the progress he’s helped his business make. Mosley has lived in the county for about four years after attending grad school at Cornell University, and he’s enjoyed working with NYSEG to push for clean energy programs and more community engagement.

“I’m happy to be an Ithacan by choice,” he said. “There’s a lot of great research, not just at Cornell, but throughout the Southern Tier, whether it be in Binghamton, expanding all the way into central New York with Syracuse. So, there’s a great air in the community that things are changing and changing in a good way. And I’m happy that I can represent some of that progressiveness. And I’m happy that I can continue, hopefully, to drive the discussion around how we move towards a more sustainable future.”

Fellow business leader and Fab5 winner MacQueen, a physician assistant, also spoke highly of her business’s growth. As covered by Tompkins Weekly back in 2020 (tinyurl.com/ya8j4td3), MacQueen opened her business, Pine Point Medical, with her husband, Dr. Doug MacQueen, just a little over a year ago. And since then, the business has grown considerably, with three more people having joined the team.

Pine Point Medical’s focus on telehealth actually came about well before the pandemic hit the county, Tess said, but that focus ultimately put her business ahead of the curve.

“Part of it came down to realizing that there was a marginalized population out there that I thought needed different care and different access,” she said. “I realized there were some real barriers to health care. … I had already been working on the software and the companies and how to do all that before the pandemic hit. And so, once we were in full swing COVID mode, we were up and running with the remote check-in and telemedicine and all of that stuff.”

Tess isn’t the only one being celebrated for her work involving marginalized populations. Phipps is the third executive director at Village at Ithaca, a local nonprofit advocacy organization that, as Phipps described, “provides responsive programming and services for youth and family in Tompkins County, specifically BIPOC, low-income and other vulnerable people in our community.”

“We have always had a focus on the public school system,” she said. “And in the last two years, when a global pandemic has sort of forced everyone to rethink everything we know about public school and about equity, it’s really been an opportunity for us to grow. So, it was an interesting time to come into a leadership position here and a pretty amazing opportunity to expand the reach of a place that I really love.”

Another Fab5 winner known for her advocacy work is Depew, who works as a financial analyst for Cornell and volunteers on several community organizations like the Ithaca Asian American Association, the Advocacy Center and Cornell University Employee Assembly, which she chairs. She said that her work, especially at the Ithaca Asian American Association, has only become more important during the pandemic.

“We’re a pretty big community here, and I think it’s important to do some outreach and connect with the community, especially, I think, in the face of some of the issues that I’ve seen come about more recently,” she said. “It’s good to have that community to lean on one another, to talk about some of the things that have been happening in our lives. … It’s just really good to have community when things happen and trying to build on the existing infrastructure and the relationships that the Ithaca Asian American Association has built over time to do information sharing and community building.”

Winners and organizers agreed that this year’s Fab5 Awards — like last year’s awards — are a welcome bright spot in what has been a rough couple of years for many residents and help to highlight the hard work young professionals are doing in their communities.

“People who have always struggled are struggling more,” Phipps said. “People who have not struggled are struggling for the first time. The world is dark. Things are hard. I always appreciate an opportunity for joy. And this is an opportunity for joy and also an opportunity to look at our community and say, ‘Look at what people are doing, look how hard we’re trying and’ — for me — ‘look at how much harder we can try.’ So, for me, it’s a little bit of an incentive. It’s like, ‘Alright, well, that’s a big deal. I better live up to that recommendation.’”

As for the next Fab5 awards, White said there’s still a lot of uncertainty looking that far out, but organizers are hopeful that the award ceremony can finally go back to being in person.

“We’d love to just have it in person and have a safe time for us to all just be together and be able to celebrate some awesome people,” she said.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@vizellamedia.com.