Amisha dedicated 30 of her years to organizing. She was the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative for 15 of those years, from 2007 until 2022. Then in 2023, she served as senior advisor to the transition team of Mayor Brandon Johnson and continued to advise the Collaborative and other social justice effort in Chicago and nationally.
Before leading the Collaborative, she spent years leading arts-based prevention programming to end violence against women in communities of color in the Bay Area. She then organized hospital employees and Head Start workers as an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 73 in Chicago. Over her decades of organizing, Amisha received numerous recognitions, including Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40 award.
Her writing has appeared in Crain’s Chicago Business, The Forge, In These Times, Truthout, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Among other works, Amisha wrote two important articles sharing her lessons for organizers and all fighters for justice. In 2022 she published “Lessons from Chicago Coalition Building” and just this year, she published “Fighting Cancer Has Given Me New Insights on the Anti-Fascist Challenge We Face.” Amisha also gifted our movement with her paintings and graphic art, showing us how beauty and passion could inspire the struggle for justice.
Over the last nine years, Amisha bravely fought cancer and twice pushed it back into remission. Last year, she had to begin her third struggle with the disease. After a period of fierce effort to beat it again, she turned her amazing courage and resolve toward facing the conclusion of her time with us. She gave her many loved ones the gift of the opportunity to say good by. On April 24th, she transitioned peacefully and surrounded with loving company.
Amisha has been a crucial part of Chicago’s labor/ community fabric. She is fiercely brilliant and has helped lead some of the most courageous fights to rebalance power and call for accountability with corporations in this city for working people. Her legacy will always be to analyze the field and lead the resistance with joy. To do what you love and stand strong in who we are and to lead with love. Her giggle will forever live in my heart.
— Erica Bland, Executive Vice President, SEIU HCII and Grassroots Collaborative Board President
Amisha made the Collaborative the heart of a movement that reimagined what Chicago could be. She helped bring together the forces that could realize a new vision for our city. I am especially grateful to Amisha for showing us the connection between rigorous organizing and deep caring. All the ways she has led, pushed, convened, created, joked and partied were motivated by deep feelings of love. She demonstrated how relationships are the fiber of our work.
— Carlos Fernandez, Grassroots Collaborative Executive Director
Amisha vive, la lucha sigue! I so wanted and want Amisha to hold my hand on my deathbed, rather than the other way around. And I suspect she will, as her vibrant memory lives in me and so many others.
I want to always have access to that laugh of hers that infects all of our work together with so much fun. Amisha’s accomplishments at the Grassroots Collaborative were legion, from holding a community labor table strong enough to support the great Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012 to creating popular education programs that allowed regular members of the Collaborative’s unions and community organizations to get to know each other across organizational lines.
The one thing that stands out for me is that healing thing that she did, where she identified the fractures in the movement—our competitiveness, our jealousies, our control freakiness—and suggested that we get together to talk, to eat, to play very silly games, so we can heal and remember how much we love each other or at least how much we need each other if we’re gonna beat the bad guys.
Amisha was always the one to include art and fun in a campaign: want to demand that the Chicago Board of Trade return our property tax subsidy funds they were given under Mayor Daley to rehab their bathrooms? Amisha and her crew created the March of the Golden Toilet complete with a spray-painted gold toilet, and sure enough the Board of Trade returned those millions in TIF subsidies!
Never was there anyone as comfortable in their own skin as Amisha is. More insightful than anyone I know, she could help me find the places deep inside of me that had been hurt and give me permission to face those places at last. It turns out that someone who is deeply ashamed of feeling unlovable can face that feeling and even watch it partially dissipate. Amisha did this through a process of peer counseling known as Re-evaluation Counseling, and she has been a leader in that too.
In what will be called her last days, Amisha responded to the huge outpouring of love from hundreds of her friends by asking us to tell her how much we love her. So direct and demanding, and so much fun to respond with stories and poems and specifics. They would make a book and comprise part of what Amish left us with.
Amisha’s beloved spouse Neena also has much to teach us, not the least of which is to remember to always turn towards the loved ones we might take for granted every day, and enjoy each other. Then there is the part about sleeping on narrow hospital furniture and holding pain-wracked bodies through the worst and best experiences. Have we ever witnessed so great a love as that one?
So many stories to tell and I will enjoy telling all of them as Amisha moves forward in our lives. Go big, own your power, laugh hard, love wide. Amisha vive, La lucha sigue.
— Madeline Talbott
There are few organizers who had as much to do with changing Chicago’s political climate as Amisha Patel. As the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative and leader in Grassroots Illinois Action (GIA), she was a key organizer in the fight for a more equitable Chicago in campaigns that impacted the lives of Chicagoans to this day.
Whether leading the fight for education equity with the Chicago Teachers Union and community groups and labor unions in their historic strike in 2012, or as a one of the four founders of the United Working Families (UWF) independent political organization in 2014 (along with Karen Lewis, CTU; Keith Kelleher, SEIU HCII; and Katelyn Johnson of Action Now); Amisha was always at the forefront of building power for working families in Chicago.
In between elections, with her leadership at the Collaborative and GIA, Amisha’s organizing and strategic fingerprints and brilliance were key in many progressive, community campaigns throughout Chicago and Illinois: from the fight to demand and win refunds of TIF bailouts to huge corporations, to the fight for the Illinois Green New Deal, to the fight for progressive taxation to make Chicago and Illinois’ rich and corporations pay more and lower the tax burden on working families.
On a personal note, I first met Amisha when she was working as an organizer with SEIU Local 73, organizing Head Start workers throughout Chicago and outstate Illinois. It was tremendously difficult and challenging organizing for anyone, but Amisha took it head on and I was impressed not only with her organizing skill and dedicated work ethic, but also with her fierce love for the members she was organizing, majority women of color.
Amisha has made her mark in Chicago and Illinois. Now it is up to all of us to continue this organizing and remember Amisha as the brilliant, inspirational leader she was to me.
— Keith Kelleher
