Lisa Schneider Fabes was a longtime nonprofit and public-sector consultant and leader who was a chief adviser to then-Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and served as Lightfoot’s campaign manager and transition manager.
Fabes handled strategic planning and communication as part of her work for the Chicago Housing Authority. She led initiatives within Chicago Public Schools and also helped form new nonprofits.
“The thing that Lisa was incredible at was, you could put a group of people around her with different opinions and different thoughts and she was able to get all that information and develop a strategy to move forward where everybody felt like they had input and a stake in moving forward with the plan,” said former CHA CEO Terry Peterson. “She had an incredible ability to pull everybody together and get everybody on the same page.”
Fabes, 60, died of a heart attack on Sept. 25 at Evanston Hospital, said her husband, Brian Fabes. She had been a longtime Wilmette resident.
Born in St. Louis in 1964, Fabes grew up in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue and graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1987 and then, after spending a gap year in London, she served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala from 1988 until 1990. Fabes then took a job in 1990 working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and while working there earned a law degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1995.
In 1997, Fabes took a job with the Chicago Housing Authority as a senior manager in its environmental department, building a team responsible for protecting residents from urban environmental hazards. The following year, she was named the CHA’s director of strategic planning, leading the creation and execution of a 10-year urban renewal project.
While working for the CHA, the federal government ceded control of the agency to the city of Chicago, and Fabes helped lead the work that became the plan for the $1.5 billion transformation at the CHA, her husband said.
Fabes left the CHA in 2001 to become the first paid staff member of future Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first congressional campaign. She continued working for his campaign through the 2002 primary.
Fabes was a project manager for Chicago Public Schools from 2002 until 2005, focusing on improving education on the South Side and implementing a districtwide initiative to improve the quality and experience of the district’s teachers and principals.
In 2005, Fabes formed her own consulting firm, LSF Consulting, serving clients in the nonprofit and public sectors. Almost immediately, however, she returned to the CHA on a contract basis to serve as managing director of internal and external communications.
Fabes returned to her own consulting work full-time in 2007. In 2016, she was the project manager for Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force, which made specific recommendations on reforming the Chicago Police Department. And she led several Chicago Public Schools initiatives for its CEO and chief education officer, including managing the redesign of Sullivan High School in Rogers Park.
Fabes also managed the Chicago neighborhood development awards for Local Initiatives Support Corporation Chicago for many years, she organized the West Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative’s application for a prize from the Pritzker Traubert Foundation and used the funds for the Sankofa Village Wellness Center in West Garfield Park, which broke ground last year. She also managed Emanuel’s police accountability task force.
In 2018, Fabes was tapped to serve as the chief operating officer for Lori Lightfoot’s ultimately successful mayoral campaign. Once Lightfoot won in 2019, Fabes was named the campaign’s transition manager.
After Lightfoot was sworn in, Fabes continued working as an unpaid senior adviser in the mayor’s office. She also was appointed to a job as vice president of strategic initiatives for World Business Chicago, a public-private nonprofit agency run by the mayor that receives a mix of city tax money and private funding to push for economic development and promote Chicago as a global city.
The city’s inspector general at the time, Joseph Ferguson, looked into the arrangement as Fabes was assigned by World Business Chicago to City Hall, and thus was collecting a salary while ignoring residency rules requiring city employees to live in Chicago.
“Lisa Fabes is somebody that I’ve known for a long time. She’s provided, I think, great assistance and value to the city,” Lightfoot told reporters in 2019. “I first worked with her professionally during the Police Accountability Task Force. She was very instrumental in setting up our transition efforts and has played a key role.”
Less than eight months after Lightfoot took office, however, Fabes resigned both from World Business Chicago and from her unpaid role advising Lightfoot and returned to consulting. Ferguson ended the probe.
After leaving her work with Lightfoot, Fabes helped start several organizations, including Hope Chicago, which helps CPS graduates go to college debt-free, and UNITY Forum, an initiative aimed at building bridges between the area’s African American and Jewish communities. She also managed the Illinois COVID-19 Response Fund.
“Lisa was just a force of nature,” said Rev. Chris Harris, one of UNITY Forum’s co-founders. “She was an individual who was able to help take your ideas and your vision from ideation to manifestation, and she was always thinking about what you never would have considered. She was excellent with the word execution — she got it done.”
Fabes never retired. At the time of her death, she had been working on the congressional campaign of Phil Andrew, who is seeking election to the 9th congressional district.
“Lisa was one of my first supporters to jump in both feet and recently took on the reins as our campaign manager,” Andrew said in a statement. “From crazy youth soccer carpooling with our daughters to taking on the enormity of Chicago violence, Lisa was a wing woman anybody engaged in hard, impactful work sought. Her smile, laugh, wit and dedication to impact will endure.”
In Wilmette, Fabes long had been interested in local education. She initially was president of the Wilmette School District 39 Community Review Committee, which advised officials on improvements in teaching, learning or managing operations. Then, she was elected to the District 39 school board in 2017, and she won reelection in 2021.
“She thought there were things that could be better in Wilmette public schools,” Brian Fabes said. “I think she liked seeing the impact of her work in front of her, in her own community. She served as president of the board during COVID-19, and that was very challenging. But she was able to pull on resources from across the country to help the board make hard, critical decisions — sometimes on a daily basis — and she liked being part of helping make those hard decisions as best as they could.”
She chose not to seek reelection in 2025, adhering to a local practice of school board members serving no more than two terms.
Julia Stasch, the former John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation president, said that although Fabes’ career was “a diverse patchwork of positions, programs and projects,” she really “had only one job throughout her professional life: to use her extraordinary talent, skills and humanity to improve the lives of as many people as possible through whatever levers for change, public or private, were available.”
“It is a terrible irony that it was her heart that took her away, because it was her heart that brought us all together,” Stasch said. “Her deep intelligence and curiosity allowed her to be successful and effective, but it was her heart that made her who she was.”
In addition to her husband, Fabes is survived by a son, Asher; two daughters, Lele and Ariel; a brother, Daniel; and her parents, Stephen and Barbara.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.