Fund Alum Spotlight: Bridget Lee, ALL Hands on Deck for Upcoming Elections and Budget Advocacy

Bridget Lee did not initially set out to work in education. She graduated from Indiana University’s business school in 2012 with plans that looked more like a corporate conference room than a classroom. But, through Teach For America, she became a fifth- and sixth-grade journalism teacher in Indianapolis, where she led her students to think critically about which stories are told and which voices are amplified.

Her path through Chicago’s public education system is wide-ranging. She joined Chicago Public Schools as the Manager of Performance Policy and, in 2021, became the Director of Education Strategy. There, she coordinated academic strategy across more than a dozen Central Office teams, led the redesign of the district’s School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), and co-led the COVID-19 return-to-school task force. She also led the development of CPS’s “Start with Heart” back-to-school framework to help teachers prioritize identity and relationships in post-pandemic classrooms.

It was during her time at CPS that something crystallized. She led the team that calculated student outcome data for the district, preparing memos on graduation rates, reading, math, and on-track figures for City Hall each reporting cycle. 

“Every single graph looked the same. The same student groups at the top. The same student groups at the bottom. Year over year,” Lee said. “If the graph never changes, it’s not an accident. It’s a design. I needed to understand how the system was designed, where the levers were, and whether anything could actually move.”

Bridget Lee, Founding Executive Director of the Academy for Local Leadership (ALL Chicago)

From 2022 to 2023, Bridget served as Director of Engagement and Operations at The Fund, where she stewarded $50M in funder relationships and led organizational strategy during a period of rapid growth. She credits that experience with teaching her things she couldn’t have learned anywhere else. 

“The Fund taught me how to run an organization,” she said. “How to focus work for high impact instead of just staying busy.” That mattered when she founded the Academy for Local Leadership (ALL) in January 2024 ahead of Chicago’s first-ever school board elections that November. 

ALL’s work operates on three levels: informing community members about how the board works and what it does, helping them understand the power they now hold in the system, and translating that into concrete priorities they can bring directly to board members. ALL works with groups already deeply embedded in their communities, including Community Action Councils on the South and West sides, bilingual councils, and organizations serving undocumented parents. “We seek out groups that have been organized around education for a long time, that care deeply, but have maybe been shut out of decision-making processes.”

Now, with elections for the first fully elected board coming this fall, she is working to ensure communities are not left behind. In its first year, ALL raised $2.4M and launched an inaugural 21-person cohort. By 2026, ALL had engaged more than 468 community members in governance workshops.

The Fund also shaped how Bridget thinks about fundraising and sustainability. 

“How philanthropy moves, what it takes to build the case for investment, how to steward relationships that actually sustain a mission,” she said. “Storytelling and strategy are not separate things. You raise $30 million by helping people believe in something, not just by presenting a deck.”

ALL Chicago grew directly out of the conviction that it matters which stories are told and whose voices are at the table. To join ALL in building an equitable and just education system that works for young people, click here.

Looking ahead, Bridget sees three levers for lasting change: prepared leaders who understand the role before they seek it, empowered communities who hold those leaders accountable, and clear governance norms that define what effective school board leadership looks like in Chicago right now.

“Chicago has everything it needs to give a world-class education to every single one of our kids,” she said. “Chicagoans actually agree on the goal. Every kid deserves a great public school. I’d add: one in their neighborhood. But the moment we get to the ‘how,’ we go to our corners. We fight to the death over our preferred approach, even when that means we win and kids lose. We have to stop doing that. We have to come to the table and improve this system one decision at a time.”