Park Ridge woman named to influential leaders’ group, gets eye-opening insights

Christina Speh recently spent a day with influential business and civic leaders getting a crash course in Chicago history, including old real estate practices designed to limit where families of color could live. She was participating after being named a part of the 2023 Daniel Burnham Fellowship, a program of Leadership Greater Chicago.

Speh, a Park Ridge resident and Wintrust Bank’s Chief Compliance Officer, is charged with overseeing the Wintrust Compliance program that includes complying with laws enacted in recent decades designed to ensure fair access to housing and financial services.

She was particularly interested in Leadership Greater Chicago’s take on Chicago’s history with redlining, a term that refers to practices realtors used to prevent African-Americans from buying homes in many parts of the Chicago area for much of the 20th century.

“Understanding some of the limitations that different individuals have had in accessing either financial services or the housing that they wanted and how that created the issues that we see today is really important,” she said.

As a Burnham fellow, Speh will spend the next six months learning about Chicago’s civic history and culture alongside people like DePaul University President Robert Manuel and Chicago Public Media’s Tracy Brown.

Previously based in New Jersey, Speh moved to Park Ridge in 2020. Though she’s been in the area for more than two years, she told Pioneer Press she still feels like a newcomer because of the pandemic.

“It’s always difficult to join a new community and to get settled and make all the connections that are necessary,” she said. “In the middle of a pandemic [when] your communities are shut down, and you can’t connect to your neighbors across the street when you walk your dog … [is] a very difficult time to join.”

The fellowship, named for the architect who created the Plan of Chicago and who famously said to “make no little plans,” is pitched at area executives who are new to Chicagoland.

About one in four Burnham Fellows are recent arrivals to the area, according to information from Leadership Greater Chicago.

The organization, first founded in 1983, aims to bring together and activate leaders in both the public and the private sector to improve Chicagoland, according to the organization’s website.

The Burnham fellowship is “designed to inspire new executive leaders to mobilize and exert their combined influence and intellect by immersing themselves in the civic fabric of Chicago to positively impact the region.”

Speh said she found the opportunity to be a Burnham fellow intriguing in part because it offered a chance to “connect into Chicago.”

“You get a different feeling about the overall civic community in Chicago, how proud they are that they have that fabric,” Speh said.

There’s only been one session for this cohort of Burnham fellows so far, which took place Feb. 10. But Speh said she’s already applying lessons from that session to her work life, citing what she’d learned in the session about TIF, or tax-increment financing districts.

“That actually came up in a conversation this morning I was in, so I was able to connect better into that conversation and understand that unique Chicago approach to community development,” she said.

Speh said much of her job centers on “listening and understanding” to questions like “what is the community trying to accomplish? How are they trying to accomplish that? And what is your partnership to help the community achieve those goals?”

In other words, she said, it’s “about connecting to our community and to our consumers.”

The grounding in Chicago’s history and civic landscape will help her do that more effectively, she said: “[When] you start from the past, you can learn from history, you can learn why we are where we’re at.”