Gail Schechter, Neighbor

Gail Schechter has been a leader in the housing justice movement since 1984, and serves as the Executive Director of Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly (H.O.M.E.) in Chicago. From 1993-2016, she was Executive Director of Open Communities, and while there in 2015, co-founded a grassroots organizing campaign for inclusive and diverse northern suburbs, The Justice Project: The March Continues. Schechter is a contributing author of "The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North" (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) with a chapter documenting the history of the equal housing movement in the northern suburbs. She is also a certified Kingian nonviolence trainer and co-founder of the Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training in Chicago. A Skokie resident since 2004, she co-founded and chaired the Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform through its successful November 2022 referendum champaign, and organized and heads Skokie Neighbors for Housing Justice. In 2025, she was elected At-Large Trustee of the Village of Skokie. The views expressed in this blog are purely her own.