A Letter from Our New Executive Director

I am honored to join Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and to lead a remarkable organization with a legendary history to a bright future. My predecessor, Bonnie Allen, has left big shoes to fill after seven years of service. Bonnie is leaving the organization strongly positioned to continue building both on her outstanding tenure and on the institution’s powerful legacy.  

I have long known and respected the work of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee, but the organization played a particularly large role in my own life in 2017, when my son Elliot entered the homestretch of his kindergarten year at National Teachers Academy. Out of the blue, Chicago Public Schools announced that it intended to close the school. In the end, the school community prevailed in partnership with Chicago Lawyers’ Committee, obtaining a preliminary injunction that stopped the closure in its tracks. The day the injunction was issued, CPS publicly abandoned its plans to close the school. In my family, it was one of the happiest moments of my son’s life that allowed him to stay in a school that felt like home. 

This is only one example of the impact of Chicago Lawyers’ Committee and how this organization achieves its mission of securing racial equity and economic opportunity for all. I am inspired by the passion and dedication of the staff, board members, volunteers, partners, and supporters. I look forward to collaborating closely with you all to carry on our mission and expand our impact.  

I am excited to now lead this team into its next chapter. I bring with me a career filled with experience fighting for racial justice and civil rights previously at the ACLU National Prison Project, and most recently in a joint role as a MacArthur Justice Center attorney and a Northwestern Law Clinical Professor for over a decade. In that role, I founded, grew, and led the Justice Center’s Supreme Court and Appellate Program into a team of sixteen staff members.   

In this work, new challenges always lie ahead, but I believe in the power of community and law to stand against systemic racism and oppression and ultimately build a society where every person is treated with decency, fairness, and respect. My son Elliot put it better than I could in his third-grade essay about his elementary school, “the lesson I’ve learned in my life is that if you keep trying, it will eventually happen.”  

I look forward to the work of building a more equitable society alongside our partners and our team at Chicago Lawyers’ Committee.  

Thank you for your continued support.  

Yours in service,

David M. Shapiro