City Club of Chicago: Ellen Alberding – President and CEO, The Joyce Foundation | WGN Radio 720

Ellen Alberding and Laura Washington at the City Club of Chicago, June 18, 2024 (City Club of Chicago)

June 18, 2024

Ellen Alberding – President and CEO, The Joyce Foundation – In conversation with Laura Washington

Description of the City Club event:

Ellen Alberding
As President and CEO and a board member of the Joyce Foundation, Ellen oversees the annual distribution of $65 million to charitable causes from $1.3 billion in assets. Under her leadership, Joyce has gained national prominence with a grantmaking portfolio grounded in the core belief that communities are stronger when they distribute benefits broadly. The Joyce Foundation funds the development and promotion of policy reforms to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation, investing heavily in research to gather facts and data so that proposed policy solutions are based on solid evidence.

As Joyce’s executive director, Ellen is active in regional and national policy. She is a founder of the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC), a grant-making consortium that invests in community-based strategies to reduce gun violence in Chicago. Ellen is an independent director of the PGIM Mutual Fund Board of Directors, a member of the Loyola University Board of Trustees, a member of the Chicago Public Education Fund Board of Directors, and a founding board member of Advance Illinois, which advocates for public education reform. She was also a founding board member of Skills for America’s Future, which advocates for business needs and improving job opportunities for community college students.

Ellen also serves on the National Council of the National Park Foundation, having previously served on the board of the NPF, and has served as Vice Chair of the City Colleges of Chicago. From 2010 to 2016, Ellen served on the board of the Economic Club of Chicago. She is frequently invited to speak on a range of topics, from the impact of public policy to the role of foundations in addressing the nation’s challenges to philanthropic accountability and governance.

Ellen holds a bachelor’s degree in English with honors from Brown University and an MBA from Northwestern University.

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Laura Washington
Laura S. Washington is a guest columnist for the Chicago Tribune and a political analyst for ABC-7, the ABC-owned Chicago station. Before joining the Tribune, she was a longtime guest columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

In 2015 and 2019 she was a visiting professor at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

Washington brings more than two decades of award-winning experience as a nonprofit professional and multimedia journalist. She specializes in African American affairs, local and national politics, race and racism, and social justice. From 2003 to 2009, she was the Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor at DePaul University and a fellow at the DePaul Humanities Center.

Washington earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the Medill School of Northwestern University, where she also taught and lectured.

Her work has been recognized with dozens of local and national awards, including two Chicago Emmys, the Peter Lisagor Award, the Studs Terkel Award for Community Journalism, and the YWCA’s Racial Justice Award. Washington is a founding member of the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement. The Chicago Community Trust awarded her a Community Service Fellowship for “exemplary service, commitment, and leadership to individuals in the nonprofit sector.” In 2018, she was inducted as a founding member of the Chicago Women’s Journalism Hall of Fame.

Her civic activities include serving on the boards of the Field Museum, the Arts Club of Chicago, Block Club Chicago, Global Girl Media-Chicago, the Chicago Headline Club Foundation, and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity.