Ahead of this year’s Democratic National Convention, there were fears of a disaster, fueled by conservative depictions of a lawless host city and the specter of mass protests that would evoke 1968. Yet where others saw pitfalls, Christy George, the executive director of the Chicago 2024 Host Committee, saw opportunities. “I love summertime Chi,” she says. “I wanted people to see Chicago through my lens: how beautiful it is, how incredible the people are, how incredible the food is. I wanted our visitors to feel that too.”
That meant pulling the camera back from the United Center and training the lens on the entire city — all 77 community areas. In the lead-up to the convention, she hosted media sessions and preplanning meetings everywhere from the Garfield Park Conservatory to the Little Village restaurant Mi Tierra. During the convention, she arranged for guided tours, open to the public, of South and West Side neighborhoods. And she prioritized contracts for local minority-owned businesses.
Perhaps most significantly, she led the fundraising that helped turn the convention into a memorably kick-ass party. She was given a target of $84 million — $20 million more than for the previous DNC. She exceeded that goal, bringing in $97 million, and all from private donors. (Hey, flying in Lil Jon doesn’t come cheap!) The feel-good result wasn’t just a sharp contrast to the 1968 convention — it was a rebuke to the perception of Chicago as a dystopian crimescape run by cartoonish bureaucrats. Reflecting on the DNC, George says she was amazed by how often a delegate would tell her: “I didn’t know how beautiful Chicago was.”
Ask the Morgan Park resident and mother of two what she does for a living, and George, a former budget official with the city and the governor’s office, says, “I solve problems and help people.” At the beginning of November, she started a new role as the CEO and president of Intersect Illinois, a public-private partnership focused on creating new investment and jobs in the state. But she’s still on a high from the convention. “I feel like it restored pride in Chicagoans,” she enthuses. “We had that feeling of, We did this! We did it so well.”