Special Programs and Convenings

Great Cities Institute’s 30 Years of Impact celebration at UIC honored three decades of engaged urban scholarship, community partnership, and public service. The event featured reflections from founding leaders, a spoken word performance by Flaco Navaja, a democracy-centered panel, an inspirational address by Reverend Damien C. Durr, and closing remarks from Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda. Together, speakers highlighted GCI’s mission to connect research with community action, advance equity and dignity, and strengthen democratic participation. The celebration reaffirmed GCI’s legacy as a hub for collaboration and transformative impact while looking ahead to the future of just cities. For more highlight videos, please click here.

The Latino Research Initiative (LRI) Summit 2024, hosted by UIC’s Great Cities Institute, convened more than 150 organizations, community leaders, scholars, policymakers, and students for a day of dialogue, research, and shared vision. The full video highlights voices from across sectors reflecting on the Initiative’s community-centered, data-driven approach to advancing equity and shaping policy for Latino communities in Chicago and beyond. Speakers emphasize demographic change, Latino leadership, accessible data, co-produced research, and the role of scholarship in advocacy and systemic change. The summit affirms the Initiative’s commitment to building research capacity, supporting opportunity, and translating data into action. For more information and multimedia from the LRI, please click here.

This Crossing Latinidades webinar brings together scholars from three universities to examine how Latino communities experience and respond to climate change and environmental injustice. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the collaboration highlights research from Chicago, North Texas, Southern California, Illinois’ river corridors, and Puerto Rico through participatory and humanistic methods, including oral histories, visual ethnography, story mapping, and community partnerships. Moderated by Teresa Córdova, the dialogue explores climate vulnerability, disaster relief exclusion, environmental racism, placekeeping, storytelling, and transnational connections, emphasizing Latino communities as sites of knowledge, agency, resilience, and resistance. For more information about this project, please click here.

UIC’s Great Cities Institute hosted a memorial event honoring the life and legacy of Dr. John Hagedorn, a scholar, activist, and mentor whose work reshaped the study of gangs and advanced justice for marginalized communities. Family, friends, colleagues, and students gathered to reflect on his groundbreaking scholarship, fearless advocacy, and lasting influence on urban research, public discourse, and social change. The event highlighted Hagedorn’s deep commitment to understanding communities too often criminalized or overlooked, as well as his enduring impact through notable works including People and Folks, A World of Gangs, The Insane Chicago Way, and Gangs on Trial.

The Freshwater Lab and UIC’s Great Cities Institute co-hosted Latino Environmental Justice Leadership Along Industrial Waterways, an event centered on environmental justice issues and actions in Chicago and the Greater Chicagoland Area. Part of the larger Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the event brought together community members and environmental justice leaders for an important collective conversation on industrial waterways, community health, and advocacy. Featured speakers included Olga Bautista, Alfredo Romo, Amy Sanchez, José Miguel Acosta Córdova, and Rose Gomez, representing organizations from Southeast Chicago, Little Village, Pilsen, Joliet, and beyond. The event highlighted community leadership, collaboration, and ongoing struggles for environmental justice.

The launch of the Latino Research Initiative at UIC’s Great Cities Institute brought together community partners, public leaders, scholars, and advocates to highlight the role of engaged research in advancing Latino communities across Chicago and Illinois. The program featured panels on co-produced reports, Latina family well-being, immigrant communities, Latino neighborhood change, employment, and settlement patterns, alongside remarks from Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García and a keynote address by Juan González. Through community data, policy analysis, and faculty scholarship, the event emphasized research as a tool for advocacy, collaboration, and systemic change while establishing the Initiative as a hub for Latino-focused knowledge and action.

The Great Cities Institute marked 10 years of powerful partnerships and Dr. Teresa Córdova’s decade of leadership with an evening of celebration, reflection, and inspiration. Featuring keynote speaker Juan González of Democracy Now! and Harvest of Empire, the event explored democracy, land justice, and community power. A dynamic panel moderated by Kathleen Yang-Clayton highlighted work across government, education, and nonprofit sectors to challenge systemic inequities and advance community-led development. With special remarks from UIC Interim Chancellor Javier Reyes and Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, the milestone celebration honored the people, partnerships, and shared commitments that continue to make Great Cities possible.

Hosted by City Club Chicago, this event brought together community leaders, researchers, and practitioners to discuss the economic future of Chicago’s West Side through the Invest Southwest initiative. Centered on North Lawndale, the conversation highlighted findings from a UIC Great Cities Institute report on economic trends, investment opportunities, and long-standing community disinvestment. Moderated by Dr. Teresa Córdova, the panel featured Rodney Brown, Brenda Palms Barber, Richard Townsell, and Debra Wesley, who explored questions of growth, equity, displacement, workforce development, public health, and community stability. The discussion emphasized development strategies that support existing residents and strengthen community-led revitalization.

Held on October 26, 2021, this virtual event commemorated the 30th anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, a landmark gathering that helped catalyze the modern environmental justice movement. Centering women of color as organizers, strategists, scholars, and movement elders, the program honored leaders whose work has advanced environmental justice across Indigenous land protection, labor rights, civil rights, public health, and community self-determination. Featuring reflections from Pam Tau Lee, Vernice Miller-Travis, Gail Small, Susana Almanza, Mililani Task, Dr. Mildred McClain, and Rose Augustine, the event affirmed environmental justice as an evolving movement rooted in community power.

Black Mayors & Leadership in the United States was a three-part virtual public series convened in March 2021 to examine Black municipal leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis. Sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Department of African American Studies in partnership with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, the series featured Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. Teresa Córdova, Director of GCI, introduced the Chicago session on criminal justice reform. Across the series, speakers explored equity, governance, coalition-building, and Black mayoral leadership in building just and resilient cities.

“Natives in Chicago,” convened by UIC’s Great Cities Institute and Native American Support Program, uplifted Indigenous presence, leadership, and lived experience in Chicago. Opening with a land acknowledgement, the event featured Janine Commonout of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, who discussed federal relocation policies, urban Native communities, and urban Indian centers as culturally grounded hubs of service, advocacy, and visibility. Panelists Jasmine Kern, Heather Miller, Cynthia Soto, and Anthony Smith connected these themes to Chicago institutions, student support, intertribal community-building, youth activism, displacement, research, and policy. The conversation emphasized healing, visibility, civic engagement, and equitable partnerships with Native communities.

On September 28, 2018, UIC’s Great Cities Institute convened Deportation and Detention: Addressing the Psychosocial Impact on Migrant Youth and Families, a public forum examining the human consequences of U.S. immigration enforcement. The event brought together scholars, clinicians, advocates, and community leaders to explore how detention, deportation, and family separation affect migrant children’s mental health, development, and family stability. Through keynote remarks, panels, and community testimony, speakers connected these harms to broader systems of criminalization, racialized enforcement, and legal uncertainty. The forum called for humane alternatives, expanded services, and policies grounded in dignity, justice, and human rights.

“The Whole World Is Still Watching,” held on August 28, 2018, at the University of Illinois Chicago, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago. With leadership from the Great Cities Institute, the event revisited a pivotal moment when antiwar protest, state violence, and national media coverage shaped public debates about democracy and dissent. Bringing together activists, scholars, public officials, and movement veterans, the program connected the legacy of 1968 to contemporary struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, gender equity, and youth-led change, underscoring protest as an enduring force for accountability and social transformation. Interviews with Mary Scott-Boria, Don Rose, Billy “Che” Brooks, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, and Jesús “Chuy” García are available here.

Inclusion and Industry 4.0: Forging a High-Wage Future for Chicagoland was a regional summit held on June 6, 2018, at the University of Illinois Chicago to advance an inclusive vision for manufacturing’s future. Convening labor, workforce, community, business, and political leaders, the event examined how advanced manufacturing, automation, and digital technologies could create high-quality jobs and equitable opportunity across the Chicago region. Featuring remarks from Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs and research from The Century Foundation and UIC’s Great Cities Institute, the summit emphasized workforce readiness, labor standards, public investment, and cross-sector collaboration as foundations for shared prosperity. For more videos, please click here.

In commemoration of the Kerner Report’s 50th anniversary, UIC’s Great Cities Institute presented a weeklong event series examining the report’s historical significance and continued relevance to racial inequality, urban policy, and social justice. Through scholarly panels, documentary screenings, keynote remarks, and conversations with civil rights leaders, the series explored the conditions behind the urban uprisings of the 1960s and the persistence of structural racism in housing, employment, education, policing, and political power. Featuring Dr. Fred Harris, Eugene “Gus” Newport, and other scholars and activists, the series invited reflection on progress, setbacks, and pathways toward equitable cities. To see the interviews, please click here.

At a June 12, 2017 news conference, education and workforce leaders joined U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and U.S. Representative Robin Kelly to address youth joblessness and promote federal legislation expanding summer and year-round employment opportunities. Hosted with the Alternative Schools Network, the event framed youth employment as a pathway to education, economic security, violence prevention, and long-term opportunity. Teresa Córdova of UIC’s Great Cities Institute provided research context on unemployment, educational attainment, earnings, racial inequities, and geographic job mismatch. Student testimonies from Youth Connection Leadership Academy underscored the importance of work, support, stability, and hope for young people.

The Great Cities Institute celebrated its 21st anniversary on November 16, 2016, at UIC’s Student Center East, honoring the Institute’s origins, impact, and commitment to urban communities. The event brought together university leaders, faculty, community partners, and supporters to reflect on more than two decades of engaged scholarship and community-centered research. Speakers highlighted the founding vision of the “Great Cities” concept, rooted in optimism about cities as places of opportunity, innovation, and shared responsibility. Featuring special guest James J. Stukel and a tribute to Robert Mier, the celebration reaffirmed GCI’s mission to strengthen Chicago through collaboration and research.