Thea Crum, MUPP
Associate Director of Neighborhoods Initiative
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About
Thea Crum, MUPP is Associate Director of the Neighborhoods Initiative at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she has worked since 2008 and served in her current leadership role since 2011. With more than 20 years of experience in community development, civic engagement, participatory governance, and capacity building, she designs and leads applied research initiatives, develops programs, secures funding, supervises emerging practitioners, and collaborates with community, government, and institutional partners to advance participatory democracy, equitable urban policy, and practice.
Crum currently serves as Chair of the Community Insights Subcommittee of the Chicago Financial Futures Task Force and is a member of the City of Chicago Reparations Task Force. She is also a Senior Fellow at People Powered, a global hub for participatory democracy, and serves as Facilitator of the North American Participatory Budgeting Research Board, which is hosted by the Great Cities Institute and the Participatory Budget Project. In these leadership roles, she helps advance research, practice, and field-building efforts that strengthen democratic participation and equity-centered public decision-making.
Crum is a nationally recognized expert in qualitative research and participatory engagement and has led and co-authored applied research initiatives, including the Illinois Racial Equity Landscape Scan. Over the past four years, she has played a central role in designing the City of Chicago’s annual budget engagement process, conducting research on resident participation, and co-authoring reports that have directly informed municipal budget decisions. She has also partnered with the Illinois Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation to design community engagement strategies that elevate resident voice and inform statewide policy priorities.
At the Great Cities Institute, Crum has provided leadership across numerous initiatives, including the Community Economic Development Research Cluster, the Civic Leadership Training Program, the ChiWest ResourceNet capacity-building initiative, and the Participatory Budgeting Chicago Initiative, where she served as Project Director. She also served as Assistant Director on the Illinois ResourceNet Initiative, which helped secure more than $113 million in federal investment for Illinois communities through technical assistance and capacity building.
Earlier in her career, Crum served as Consultant and Project Manager for the Domestic Violence & Mental Health Policy Initiative and as Associate Director of Operations at the Women’s Economic Agenda Project, where she managed organizational operations, policy development, and fiscal oversight.
Crum is an internationally recognized leader in participatory democracy and civic innovation. She is a frequent speaker, lecturer, and author, and has co-authored numerous influential publications, including Youth at the Budget Table (2024), Youth Citizenship in Action (2018), Democratizing Tax Increment Financing Funds through Participatory Budgeting (2016), and The Civics of Community Development: Participatory Budgeting in Chicago (2015). She presented on advanced participatory budgeting practices at an Obama White House convening on Participatory Budgeting.
She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Master of Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois Chicago.