Do you know someone who has gone the extra mile during the pandemic?

We asked you to tell us about north Essex’s Covid heroes.

Meet our next shining examples and nominate your community champions using the link below.

BIG-HEARTED Tony Lee is a true community champion after making hundreds of elderly people’s wishes come true.

Tony has been nominated for his kindness after launching the Wishing Washing Line initiative, as part of the Friends and Neighbours (FaNs) network, in April 2017.

Care home residents can fix their wishes to a washing line in a public place and if someone is able to grant it, they contact the care home.

He regularly spends evenings, weekends and holidays helping elderly people and manning the social media sites for FaNs.

In the last three years, hundreds of wishes have been granted to people living in care homes.

And when the pandemic set in, Tony, from Colchester, committed his whole life to caring for residents across north Essex.

This included essential things to life’s little pleasures and everything in between.

Among his good deeds, he collected and delivered personal protective equipment and scrubs free of charge during the national shortage.

He rallied takeaways to feed care home staff and raise spirits (215 staff were fed as result of his campaigning).

Tony organised outdoor concerts for residents in care homes to lift their spirits and co-ordinated a postbox scheme, in conjunction with supermarkets and other partnerships, to enable care home residents to receive Christmas cards.

The list of kind-hearted actions does not stop there. Tony delivered supplies to people being discharged from hospital into residential homes, dropped off Easter eggs and promoted partnership working across Colchester.

* Bob Finch has certainly gone the extra mile to help others during the pandemic.

Mr Finch is the director of the Colchester Talking Newspaper.

He has been heavily involved in the weekly productions, for the blind and partially sighted, for about 30 years.

This news is sent by memory stick or cassette, free of charge, to about 100 listeners, who have also been provided with free machines for listening.

There is normally a team of volunteers to do this work.

When the Covid lockdown was first introduced, many of the 500 talking newspapers around the country were forced into stopping their weekly recordings.

Colchester’s team normally pay to rent a room at Essex University to do their recordings, but this became out of bounds because of Covid restrictions.

Mr Finch, refusing to be beaten, went well above the normal call of duty in collecting all the relevant news himself and resorted to technology to record all of this at home, transfer it to relevant copying machines and then post the recordings to listeners.

They were all very grateful for his efforts and it enabled them to overcome loneliness by keeping abreast of what was happening in our town.

He has done an absolutely brilliant job and showed real dedication to helping others.

Without his commitment the blind and partially-sighted people in Colchester would not receive their weekly news and it has been a real godsend.

* Do you know someone who has gone the extra mile during the pandemic?

From collecting shopping and donations to running errands and raising money, the challenges of the past year have brought the best out in certain people.

We want to reward them by shining the spotlight on their acts of kindness.

First, we need your help.

Drop us a line here and tell us who you’re nominating as a community champion.

Give us their name and tell us what they’ve done to help, support and inspire you and others.

If you have a picture, even better.

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