Chicago’s Defining Superpower: Collaborative Civic Leadership

A Letter from Our CEO | Friday, December 19, 2025

Chicago has always been defined by its business and civic leaders who step up in moments of crisis and turn adversity into opportunity. Time and again, their collective action has set a precedent that remains the city’s greatest strength: confronting hardships head-on and forging transformative solutions that deliver lasting, equitable progress.

When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 reduced a third of the city to ashes, business and civic leaders didn’t simply rebuild — they reinvented. They imposed new building codes, embraced fireproof materials, reimagined the street grid and parks, and set higher standards for resilience and design. From that moment, Chicago’s DNA was rewritten: each crisis became a catalyst for reimagining and rebuilding the city together.

Several decades later, as industrial congestion and population growth threatened the region’s livability, Chicago’s civic, business and planning leaders stepped up again. Under the aegis of the Commercial Club of Chicago, they commissioned architects and planners Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett to craft a new civic blueprint: the 1909 Plan of Chicago, now known as the Burnham Plan.

That plan extended Michigan Avenue, created the city’s venerated continuous lakefront and established forest preserves as well as Chicago’s ingeniously interconnected network of parks, boulevards and transportation corridors. More than mere aesthetic improvements, these innovations expanded access, strengthened resilience and democratized public space long before those concepts had names. Chicago became a global model for strategic planning and public-private collaboration.

This commitment to strengthening our city has never stopped. Chicago’s superpower has always been its ability to respond to challenges with courage and innovation. When economic headwinds, social division or structural inequities emerge, our leaders don’t retreat — they organize, collaborate and create. Those instincts continue to power the city’s most transformative projects today.

Consider recent examples: the Pullman industrial revival, Xchange Chicago, the Sankofa Wellness Village and Scaling Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago — initiatives that are rewriting the playbook for inclusive growth and neighborhood investment. Each one leverages partnerships across business, government, philanthropy and community. They are built on data sharing, resource pooling and shared accountability. And each embodies the same mindset that produced the Burnham Plan by using reimagination, collaboration and innovation, across sectors, lived experiences and differences, to build a better and stronger region. In a tech-enabled era, these strategies can accelerate impact faster than ever — but only when leaders commit to authentic cross-sector collaboration and shared direction.

This is the experience that Leadership Greater Chicago has been cultivating for more than 40 years through its Fellowship programs, as demonstrated by these recent examples of transformative cross-sector partnerships led by LGC Fellows. 

Since LGC was founded in 1983, more than 1,600 leaders from business, government, education, philanthropy and nonprofits have completed its Fellowship programs, which leverage Chicago as a living classroom. Through firsthand engagement with the region’s most complex socioeconomic challenges, LGC Fellows develop deep and meaningful relationships rooted in humanity, inclusion and civic fluency — the foundational tools for building collective action. Alumni include many who are now transformational leaders locally and nationally.

In the last four decades, Fellows have been catalysts for some of Chicago’s most forward-looking projects, from developing tech-workforce pipelines and advancing affordable housing conversions to expanding access for people with disabilities and championing community-based equity programs. Their hallmark is collaboration and a shared love for the great city we call home — the same civic muscle that has always defined Chicago’s progress.

Today, as the nation faces structural shifts, global volatility and social polarization, the imperative for this kind of leadership is urgent. The economy is shifting, demographics are evolving and every sector — from finance to philanthropy — is navigating new expectations for equity, innovation and purpose. In this environment, resilience is no longer just for recovery — it’s a strategy for long-term success.

And in Chicago, resilience has always involved collaborative civic leadership. Our city’s resilience is not luck; it’s an intentional choice made over and over again by cross-sector civic leaders who believe we must act together and serve across lines of difference.

At LGC, we see daily proof that civic leadership and collective activation aren’t just idealistic — they are economically catalytic and socially transformative. When business leaders, public officials and community advocates connect with purpose, the city doesn’t just recover — it accelerates. That dynamic has shaped Chicago since the ashes of 1871, and it remains the defining force that will propel us into the future. For Chicago, crises have never been an ending — they have always been the opening chapter of reinvention and new beginnings.

Myetie Hamilton is the CEO of Leadership Greater Chicago and an LGC Fellow since 2016.