Yankee Magazine Seeks 'Angels Among Us' Nominations for 2026

Yankee Magazine wants to find New England’s quiet heroes, and nominations are open through May 15, 2026.

The magazine is accepting submissions for its “Angels Among Us” series, which profiles ordinary residents doing extraordinary charitable work across the six states. If you know someone who feeds a neighborhood, mentors kids, or hauls supplies up a dirt road so a disabled hiker can reach a summit, this is the call.

Nominations go to [email protected]. Include your name, town, and state, plus the nominee’s name, location, best contact information, and a 100-word description of why they deserve the spotlight. Short and specific wins here. Tell the story, not the feeling.

Past honorees show the range of what the series covers.

In 2017, Annemarie and Bruce Albiston of the Adaptive Outdoor Education Center earned recognition for their work putting the outdoors within reach of people with disabilities. The photo that ran with their profile says everything: Donald Freeman of Bath, Maine, a return visitor to their center, holding a fishing rod with the kind of focus that doesn’t need any caption. That’s what good programming looks like.

Also in 2017, Blyth Lord of the Courageous Parents Network was named for building a community around one of the hardest things a family can face. The network connects and supports parents of seriously ill children, a job nobody applies for and everybody hopes to never need.

The 2016 class brought Roland Bousquet of Mexico, Maine, who turned personal guilt about not serving in Vietnam into a monthly Veterans Appreciation Day for his hometown. It’s that kind of specific, relentless local commitment the series keeps finding. Peter Berman and Marquis Taylor, co-founders of Coaching For Change, trained college students to lead in local schools. “Kids step up to the plate when they’re given responsibility,” Taylor said. From 2015, David Cote founded The Summit Project, a Maine nonprofit dedicated to preserving the memories of fallen service members.

Nancy Cayford of Friends of the Oglala Lakota collected and donated thousands of books to schools and medical clinics on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, working a route that stretches far outside New England but started with one woman in one town deciding she could help.

The pattern here isn’t wealth or credentials. It’s consistency.

These aren’t people who wrote a check once. They built something, showed up every week, drove the long way. They didn’t wait for a grant or a committee. They just started.

New England has never been short on that type. The region’s towns are small enough that one determined person can shift the whole temperature of a place, and the “Angels Among Us” series has spent years documenting exactly that. If you’re hiking the trails around Mount Washington this spring and your trailhead parking lot stays clean, or a local land trust keeps that ridgeline from becoming condos, there’s usually one exhausted volunteer behind it who hasn’t been thanked publicly in years.

That’s your nominee.

Write the hundred words, send it to [email protected] before May 15, 2026, and let someone else do the thanking for once.