It’s a beautiful day to be a Chicagoan: Opening remarks at the Chicago Charter Symposium

On Monday, March 24, 2025, the Chicago Policy Center hosted the Chicago Charter Symposium at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law. It was the first gathering of its kind in more than 50 years. In attendance were five sitting aldermen, one former alderman, several City Council staffers, and one former governor, among other civic leaders and community members. You can find discussion of the event and the Chicago Policy Center in the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Line (paywalled), Politico Illinois, and this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast on WGN Radio. Below are my welcoming remarks, lightly edited for clarity.

Good morning and thank you all for being here. It is a beautiful day to be a Chicagoan.

I’m here speaking to you today because of two stories. And the first begins with an email that I received almost 10 years ago.

At that time I was working on criminal-justice reform at the Illinois Policy Institute, and I had been publishing some opinion columns in local newspapers across the state. At that time, my headshot ran with the columns, so most of the emails I received were from people who were angry that I looked like I was 12 years old.

But this email was much different. It was from a woman named Lisa Creason.

It read, “I live in Decatur. I have a story I need to tell you.”

I replied, “Great, I would love to speak with you.”

She wrote back, “OK, I’m taking the next train to Chicago.”

Lisa was serious. She came into our office. And she told me the following story.

When she was 19 years old she attempted to steal money from a Subway sandwich store cash register to feed her infant daughter while they were experiencing homelessness.

She served a year in prison for her crime.

She got out of prison and her fiancé was killed by a stray bullet, leaving her to raise three kids by herself while working two jobs.

She eventually got a job as a nursing assistant. And she discovered for the first time her passion and purpose in life, which was to serve others through healthcare. But she couldn’t earn enough money to achieve her dream: to buy her own house and to get off government assistance.

So she went to school to become a registered nurse, which would triple her pay overnight. She completed one or two credits a semester. She was still working two jobs. Still raising her kids. Studying on the bleachers at their basketball, baseball, and football games.

It took her seven long years of work. But Lisa persisted. And she finally received the good news: she passed her tests.

She called her mom saying, “I did it, I’m moving out of the ‘hood.”

She called her kids saying, “I did it, we’re moving out of the ‘hood.”

But the next call she got was from the state of Illinois. They told Lisa that because of the crime she committed more than 25 years ago, she was categorically barred from working as a registered nurse in the state of Illinois.

Lisa was stunned.

She asked the question most of us would ask: “What do I do?”

The state employee on the phone said, flippantly, “You can get a pardon or you can change the law.”

Lisa said, “I’m going to change the law.”

And then she hung up the phone.

Lisa traveled to Springfield every day of legislative session for two years to try to change the law. She’d talk to anyone, from security guards to executive assistants. But lawmakers weren’t listening. Her bill wasn’t getting anywhere.

Then we told Lisa’s story. And told Illinoisans to take action to help.

Thousands of people contacted their lawmaker. Lisa’s bill got momentum. And it passed.

It was one of the great honors of my life to attend the signing of “Lisa’s Law” in Decatur at Richland Community College, where Lisa studied to be a nurse.

Lisa has now achieved her dream. She owns her own house and is off of government assistance. And it wasn’t just Lisa. There were roughly 1,000 nurses in Illinois during the COVID-19 pandemic who would not otherwise have been working in the profession if not for Lisa’s story and advocacy.

She is my hero.

The most remarkable thing about Lisa’s story is this: Throughout that entire saga, Lisa could have achieved her dreams by moving across the state line to Missouri, where the law would have allowed her to work as a registered nurse.

One day I asked Lisa about that.

“Why didn’t you move?”

She looked at me like it was the dumbest question she had ever heard.

“If I left, then it would never get fixed for the people I left behind,” she said.

That, my friends, is how things get better. It is the only way they get better.

So it is indeed a beautiful day to be a Chicagoan because you are all here. Staying here. Working to make things better.

In that spirit I’d like to take a minute to thank the people who made today possible, including my co-author of the New Chicago Way Ed Bachrach, Joe Ferguson at the Civic Federation, state Rep. Kam Buckner, Gerrin Alexander at Chicago Policy Center, and Amy Korte and Matt Paprocki at Illinois Policy Institute. This programming would not be possible without their support.

I’ve told you the first story of why we’re here. Here is the second.

On a day much like today, a little more than 10 years ago, two Chicagoans were walking in the Loop. One younger. One older.

The younger Chicagoan was a 16-year-old with a chipped tooth. The older Chicagoan was his mentor.

The 16-year-old with the chipped tooth was from the West Side. He was born at Mount Sinai hospital in North Lawndale. And he happened to be a bit of a chubby baby when he was born. That earned him the nickname Bon Bon among his family.

Bon Bon’s life, from the beginning, had not been easy. His mom was just 15 years old when she had him. She was in care of the state at the time, because her own mother struggled with substance abuse. Before he was five years old Bon Bon had been placed in two different foster homes outside his family. He was diagnosed with ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, and PTSD. In part to deal with the side effects of his medication, he started smoking marijuana, which was a daily habit by the time he turned 11. And he was hospitalized three times for psychiatric episodes.

At one of those hospital visits, a counselor asked him to do a common evaluation for children where they complete sentences.

“I would describe my view of the world as [blank].”

“Bad,” he said.

“Every child gets [blank].”

“Punched,” he said.

He told one clinician that his life had been “hell” and he did not have a single happy memory from his childhood. And if he could have three wishes, he said, it would be to start his life over, have enough money to live a decent life, and have his grandmother back alive.

On that day in the Loop, Bon Bon was no longer worthy of the nickname Bon Bon.

He was a lanky 16-year-old standing at 6’2”. And his life was starting to turn around. He was maturing. His poor self-image was improving. He was about to start treatment for the first time for his dependence on drugs. And his mom was regularly attending family counseling.

In fact, he was downtown with his mentor that day because he wanted a job. But he didn’t have a copy of his birth certificate. So they went together to the Cook County Clerk’s office. And they got Bon Bon’s birth certificate.

As some of you may know already, the government name written on that birth certificate was Laquan Joseph McDonald.

The following year, he would be pronounced dead at the same hospital where he was born, after being shot 16 times by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.

Laquan’s death was an unspeakable tragedy. It was simply one of the most horrifying moments in our city’s history.

And while Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder, the response to this tragedy was nothing short of an indictment of how Chicago government operates.

Here are just a few examples.

Despite more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests, the city’s Law Department, led by an unelected corporation counsel, refused to release footage of the shooting for over a year. The mayor was re-elected in the meantime.

Some members of Chicago City Council had been told that a video existed. None had seen it. They held no debate and asked no questions before voting on a settlement payment to McDonald’s family. The vote took just five seconds.

The mayor fired the sitting police superintendent. Per city law, the Chicago Police Board was supposed to make three recommendations from whom the mayor would pick the new superintendent. Instead, City Council suspended the rules at the mayor’s request and allowed the mayor to pick his favored superintendent Eddie Johnson, who didn’t even apply for the job. Johnson was later fired after a Chicago police officer found him drunk behind the wheel of a parked car.

Today there are, depending on how you count, eight different entities responsible in some way for police oversight in Chicago. Yet the city has completed just 9% of the federal consent decree that was itself spurred by Laquan’s murder.

I tell this story because Laquan and his loved ones paid the ultimate price for a city government that was and remains severely broken.

Its structural faults aren’t just in police governance. They pervade every aspect of city government. There is a steep price, which has been paid for generations, and put on the shoulders of future generations, for structural problems with city government. These problems remain unsolved.

We’re here today because it’s not enough to say that Chicagoans deserve a little better from their city government. They deserve the very best.

They deserve the most effective, the most trustworthy, and the most accountable big city government in the United States. That is our vision in launching the Chicago Policy Center. And that is the reason why we are discussing a city charter today.

A city charter is not a panacea. It will not raise the dead. But it can provide us with the tools and processes we need to fix our problems.

But a charter can finally bring responsible government principles and healthy civic engagement to our political structure and culture.

It’s a beautiful day to be a Chicagoan.