Susana Vasquez, who for nearly two decades has worked to redevelop Chicago neighborhoods, is the new executive director of LISC’s Chicago office. LISC, the nation’s leading community development support organization, has been redeveloping Chicago neighborhoods since 1980. The move is a natural evolution for Vasquez, who joined LISC/Chicago in 2003 as a program officer and soon became director of the office’s most ambitious effort – the New Communities Program, a ten year project to comprehensively redevelop 16 Chicago neighborhoods.

Over the years, Vasquez, 40, has developed a reputation as a savvy organizer, a polished diplomat, a decisive executive and a skilled personnel manager – all essential qualities in navigating the complicated world of Chicago neighborhoods, local politics, multiple funding sources and numerous partnerships required to make underserved neighborhoods better and stronger. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in U.S./Latin American History, Vasquez cut her community development teeth as an organizer on the Affordable Housing Campaign (led by the Chicago Rehab Network), as a tenant organizer at the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, and as a community organizer at the Resurrection Project, where she became the deputy director. She left to earn a master’s degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and returned to Chicago to work for LISC, where she oversaw the expansion of NCP from a three-neighborhood pilot program to the 16 neighborhoods it encompasses today.