Since launching her career as a tenant organizer in 1984, Gail Schechter has been a local and national leader in fair, affordable, and intergenerational housing; investigation of housing discrimination complaints; housing development; and community organizing. Today Gail serves as the Executive Director of the nonprofit Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly (H.O.M.E.), providing and championing intergenerational housing and support services for low-income seniors throughout the City of Chicago.
She is also a widely recognized thought leader in conceiving of and implementing creative grassroots strategies for just, beloved communities, most recently as the organizer of “The Justice Project: The March Continues” in Chicago’s northern suburbs, the Evanston-based racial equity focused Community Alliance for Better Government, and the Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform, which won three citizen-led referendums in 2022 that break a nearly 60-year single-party monopoly on local government. In 2012, the Governor appointed her to fill the “affordable housing advocate” seat on the State Housing Appeals Board, the enforcement body of the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act which she helped to pass. Gail is also a co-founder of the Chicago-based Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training and the author of “We’re Gonna Open Up the Whole North Shore” in the anthology The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (2016). She has a B.A. with honors in history from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Tufts University in Urban and Environmental Policy.
As to how I remember my time together with Sherman and IGL, I attach a letter that I wrote on that very topic 10 years ago! Feel free to take what you want from it. (And yes, I was a "valedictorian" for my Urban & Environmental Policy class at Tufts, in 1990).
