Mellisa Cain, Community organizer, Burlington When Mellisa Cain started distributing cloth face masks in May of last year, she thought she'd buy and give away a few hundred in Burlington's Old North End; she had funding with a small grant from her Neighborhood Planning Assembly. Recalling it in a recent interview, she laughed at the contrast between that initial plan and what actually happened: In the first year of the pandemic, Cain led an effort to obtain and distribute some 40,000 masks. click image They filled up her one-bedroom apartment and took over her life. She bought and cut fabric for volunteers to sew 7,000 masks. She tie-dyed a few thousand and screen-printed the Black Lives Matter logo on others. She walked through the streets, stopped in businesses and hung out in parking lots, giving masks away. Before long, she was being recognized as the neighborhood's "mask lady."