Progressive activist and community organizer Amisha Patel was up for a fight.
Whether battling for affordable housing or against state budget cuts that impacted poor and working-class people, she often helped lead the charge in Chicago and at the state level during her time as executive director of the Chicago non-profit Grassroots Collaborative.
She led the group — a coalition of community and labor organizations dedicated to advancing racial, economic, and social justice — from 2012 to 2022.
Her efforts helped push the city to raise the minimum wage.
And she was adamant about holding a spotlight to the city’s often questionable use of Tax Increment Financing dollars, which are supposed to be spent in blighted areas.
In 2019 her group sued the city to block the use of $900 million in TIF funds to pay for infrastructure at the North Side development of Lincoln Yards.
“Amisha’s was one of the great voices of lefty activism from her generation,” said friend and longtime Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky. “She was unflinching. It’s hard to convey just how courageous she was in standing up to the powerful people and institutions in this town.”
Ms. Patel died April 24 from cancer. She was 50.
Ms. Patel brought together various unions, religious groups and neighborhood organizations spanning different demographics and showed them how their interests aligned.
“She was great in front of a microphone at a demonstration, but equally as good in the back of the room connecting different groups that normally would not talk, like neighborhood organizations and unions, and helping each see their common ground,” said Carlos Fernandez, current executive director of Grassroots Collaborative.
A longtime friend of Mayor Brandon Johnson, she volunteered on his mayoral campaign and served on his transition team when he took office.
“She built a political home for Chicago’s multi-racial working class,” Johnson said at her funeral.
“She was an organizer with a vast network and she could call people and say ‘This is what’s going on. It’s not right. Let’s do something about it.’ And people would respond because she had integrity and the things she was calling attention to really needed to be exposed,” said her wife, Neena Hemmady.
“Everything she’s done has always been about people, people living better lives, being treated fairly, having government work the way its supposed to, having our public institutions funded properly — she wanted this for the people,” she said.
A hallmark of Ms. Patel’s activism was using imagery and art — often in the form of costumes, props, or even a flower in her hair — to engage an audience and draw attention to a cause.
She championed the use of a golden toilet in 2012 while demonstrating outside City Hall against the use of TIF dollars to renovate bathrooms at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
The Grassroots Collaborative is working to establish a fellowship in Ms. Patel’s name to further her legacy of integrating the use art to make a message more engaging and clear, her wife said.
Ms. Patel was born May 30, 1975, in Chicago to Arvind Patel, an insurance salesman, and Kusum Patel, a factory worker.
Ms. Patel attended Conant High School in Hoffman Estates and Stanford University, where she co-founded an environmental and social justice organization named Youth United for Community Action.
She worked as an activist in the San Francisco Bay Area before returning to Chicago.
“She always knew she would come back, her love of Chicago was just palpable,” her wife said.
She loved to play games and get people to open up about themselves at meetings, changing her hairstyle and singing karaoke. Her favorite tunes to belt out were “Wrecking Ball” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
In addition to her wife, Ms. Patel is survived by her son, Ayush Hemmady-Wright,
and her daughter, Varsha Hemmady-Wright.
Services have been held.