Kennedy Bartley knows her way around 121 N. Lasalle.

Her group, United Working Families, has long sought to shape public policies passed through City Hall. They hold political action events there, attend council meetings to push their agenda, and work to elect grassroots organizers.

But for the first time since UWF’s ascension in Chicago politics, Bartley and the organization she’s been tasked to lead have an influential seat at the City Hall table, with the mayor they helped elect.

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On a recent Wednesday, Bartley wends her way through City Hall with ease, tossing greetings to familiar faces before meeting with alderpersons from the council’s progressive caucus on key legislation the UWF supports.

Perhaps most indicative of how the tides have changed for Bartley, and the coalition she’s part of, are her trips up to the 5th floor — home of the mayor’s office.

“Good to see you,” a police officer who knows her by name said with a smile, as she got off the elevator and returned the compliment.

In a meeting with the mayor’s senior advisor, Jason Lee, Bartley updated him on the progressive caucus briefings she held on one of the mayor’s key campaign pledges.

“Promising stuff. We had a really, really good briefing with the progressive caucus today around Treatment Not Trauma. There seems to be a lot of alignment there,” Bartley reported.

The roughly 30-minute, standing check-in represents a level of input progressive organizers like Bartley have been fighting for for years.

The youngest and first Black executive director to lead United Working Families, 28-year-old Bartley finds herself at the helm of a progressive political powerhouse in Chicago during an unprecedented moment. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who drew massive support from the UWF in his election, has preached co-governance, the notion that those most affected by government policy have a say in crafting it.

In organizing sessions and meetings with City Hall insiders, Bartley is one of the key people carrying out and defining what that style of co-governing looks like, even as she noted it’s not a new concept.

“We’ve seen every administration co-govern — just with corporatists and the billionaire class and the [Fraternal Order of Police],” Bartley said in an interview with WBEZ. “I think if we’re doing it right, it’s actually like contentious co-governance. Because even when we win the things, it’s our responsibility on the outside to be like, ‘And that’s still not enough.’ ”

And to Bartley, the stakes are higher than ever.

“People’s lives are dependent on us getting this right,” she said. “There are compounding crises every day. There are people sleeping outside when the air quality is like 240, and when it’s freezing outside, and there are seven buses coming in a day.

“And if we get it wrong, one: People will die, people won’t be safe, people won’t be housed. And two: The right wing, and the forces that have always been against us, will capitalize on that as they do, and we won’t get another chance.”

Kennedy Bartley’s journey to United Working Families

Bartley didn’t grow up knowing she wanted to be a community organizer.

“I had, like, literally never heard that word outside of someone who makes things neat — like Marie Kondo,” Bartley said through a laugh. “I don’t think that there was a lot about where I come from, or who my parents are that would make my trajectory obvious.”

Bartley grew up in Waukegan and nearby Zion with her mom and grandparents, Bennie and Ollie, who migrated to the area from Mississippi. She spent summers eating blue crab in Jacksonville, Florida with her paternal great grandmother, who later bought an RV so the two could visit Bartley’s dad. He became incarcerated at a prison hours away.

“Many of my childhood experiences were given language to be articulated later on in my life,” Bartley said, when she went to college and started reading abolitionist theory, or learned about the prison industrial complex.

Culminating events in college — including the murder of her 14-year-old cousin — pushed her to make community organizing her life’s work. For her, that work revolves around making government more accessible to everyday people, as well as learning from and building policy with them.

“Communities that I’m interested in building power with have theorized long before academic theory was a thing,” Bartley said. “[Those theories] may not necessarily sound like some tendencies of bourgeois progressive, leftism, but they still exist. And I think about that a lot. Because I come from those folks, you know. I come from people from the deep south who resisted and made a way.”

From a service job at a chicken shack after graduating from DePaul University, Bartley has since worked at SEIU Local 1 as a researcher, UWF as a legislative director, and at the Chicago Torture Justice Center before becoming UWF’s executive director, a position she started in July shortly after Johnson’s inauguration.

Bartley behind pushes for progressive policy

One of Bartley’s closest mentors, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates, reflects on the first time she met Bartley. Bartley was inspired by a podcast she heard featuring Davis Gates, and approached her at an event asking for a meeting.

“It was her energy,” that Davis Gates remembers. “I mean she is one of the smartest people walking the Earth right now. She has a beautiful mind. That’s number one. I think number two was that she’s so fun to be around. She is funny. She has a great smile. She’s very perceptive. She’s intuitive.”

Davis Gates introduced Bartley to UWF’s executive director at the time, Emma Tai. The group was coming off its most successful City Council election round since its 2014 inception, having endorsed 10 winning candidates.

“It was a time when UWF was going to have to — not extremely differently from now — grapple at a much larger scale with what it meant to have elected members to political office, and what kind of policy, legislative and political support that project was going to require,” Tai said. “She’s always been kind of as she is now: just extremely smart, very funny, and very passionate about this work. And I was really impressed by those characteristics at the time.”

Bartley was brought on at UWF to help run the group’s “governing school,” Tai said. She later would help guide elected aldermen through the city’s budget season, attending hours of hearings, and preparing lines of questioning the council members could use to grill city officials.

In the years since, Bartley has been behind many of the progressive policy proposals introduced under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot that never advanced. The efforts were important “for the sake, in some cases, of just introducing an alternative, understanding that we would lose,” Bartley said.

In 2022, Bartley co-created a 60-page policy zine that, aesthetically “looked cool” and “was a really good design,” she joked, but more importantly was chock full of progressive policy proposals specific to Chicago, many of which made their way into Johnson’s campaign platforms.

“The work that Kennedy did then will begin to manifest in this budget season,” Davis Gates said. “What she has helped our movement do is create a framework and structure for the ask in a way that is grounded and rooted in the realities of the budget. So she can take something that’s aspirational and make it practical.”

Brandon Johnson’s first spending plan is just ‘one of four budgets on an arc’

On a day when scores of reporters and City Hall insiders gathered to watch the confirmation of Chicago’s new police Supt. Larry Snelling, Bartley and representatives from the Collaborative for Community Wellness were upstairs in a third floor conference room, preparing for aldermanic briefings on Treatment Not Trauma and the 2024 budget season.

One of the mayor’s key campaign promises, Treatment Not Trauma aims to reopen the city’s shuttered mental health clinics, remove police officers from teams that respond to mental health crises, and make those teams citywide.

This year, UWF is asking the mayor to reopen three mental health clinics “as a good faith investment” in that larger policy.

“We had — a few members of us from the Collaborative for Community Wellness — had a really promising meeting last night with some people with the mayor’s team,” Bartley announced as she started the meeting, “mainly with folks who are going to be overseeing CDPH, members of CDPH, and just as we approach the budget, we want to make sure this work isn’t happening in silos.”

Unlike past budget seasons, the group is considering sending budget questions to a representative at the Chicago Department of Public Health ahead of time — perhaps diffusing a contentious, hot-seat dynamic previously seen.

“We’ve just never engaged in a budget like this,” Bartley said, brainstorming aloud with organizers in preparation for the meeting. “I do think there is some utility to the fact that we have friends who are going to be the folks there. But really though, because in the past we’ve tried to use those budget questions to shift the conversation, and now it’s like ways to build power around the narrative.”

UWF is also pushing for funding for the long-sought Peace Book Ordinance, which would in part create a network of public safety resources for young people, and the end to the controversial SoundThinking, formerly known as ShotSpotter, contract, in this year’s budget.

But despite having a candidate they supported in the mayor’s office, those may not be presupposed victories.

At a recent news conference, Johnson expressed dissatisfaction with the ShotSpotter contract, but said he is open to hearing his new police superintendent out on the matter. On mental health clinics, Johnson wouldn’t give specifics on his budget plans, but celebrated the fact that “we’re talking about reopening public mental health centers.”

“The good news is that I get to pass multiple budgets,” Johnson said. “You’re not going to undo the type of trauma that has been executed against the people of Chicago in one budget.”

Johnson has had to balance an ambitious list of priorities with the realities of governing — this year, he’ll work to close a $538 million budget gap while chipping away at some of his campaign promises, including to not raise property taxes.

The balancing act and gradual approach is a notion Bartley understands.

“I’m seeing this budget as what it is: one of four budgets on an arc,” Bartley said. “And so recognizing the deficit that was inherited and recognizing elements of the budget that may be baked.

“At the same time, people can’t afford for us to blame the bureaucracy of government forever,” she said.

UWF’s high stakes moment

City Council’s progressive caucus, including UWF endorsed candidates, are well shy of the majority of votes needed to pass legislation on their own. Securing Johnson’s budget, and legislative wins, will take a level of collaboration with non-progressive alderpersons that some say UWF has previously lacked.

“I wanted to see more collaboration between aldermen and United Working Families,” said former Ald. Sue Sadlowski Garza — a former CTU teacher who left UWF over a dispute regarding the metal scrapper known as General Iron. “Where if I write an ordinance, everybody that that ordinance touched got a seat at the table. I didn’t like the fact that it was, ‘Here. Here’s an ordinance, pass it.’ And if you didn’t agree with it, or if you didn’t pass it, you were kind of blackballed.’”

When asked about the criticism, Bartley said passing progressive legislation “requires at least 26 votes and so I look forward to delivering to the communities that I feel accountable to.”

Davis Gates acknowledged Bartley’s new position requires multiple hats that include legislative maneuvering and bold organizing.

“I’m getting into sports analogies, sorry, but Magic Johnson played all five positions on the court,” Davis Gates said. “And if there is a template for how this is going to work or run: We got to be a center, a point guard, shooting guard and a power forward all at the same time. There is no way that people get to just pick a position and sit there … even if we’ve only played one, for the first five years, or for the first 10 years.”

Bartley played point guard and small forward growing up. She said she isn’t intimidated by the work ahead, even when that involves 14-hour days, and multiple green juices to counteract the cigarettes she’s trying to quit smoking.

But as Bartley balances the deep seriousness of her work with persistent humor (she makes multiple knock-knock-style jokes, and retells them, on a day spent with a WBEZ reporter), she says her driving force, even as a not-elected official, is the high stakes involved in the work of governing.

“Mayor Johnson, and many of the members of the progressive caucus that ran on a coordinated slate … their victories represent a mandate from people,” she said.

“And the mandate is: We believe in alternatives to policing. We believe that housing is public safety. We believe that access to mental health care is public safety. And so now it’s our responsibility to actually deliver on that.”

WBEZ’s Mariah Woelfel covers Chicago city government and politics.