Amisha A. Patel

Amisha Patel dedicated her life to moving communities toward justice, dismantling systems of oppression, connecting human beings to each other, and inspiring radical solidarity. To know her–even to meet her–was to be transformed.

Amisha loved hard, and leaves behind a vast community. She is survived by her wife Neena Hemmady, her mother Kusum Patel, her children Ayush Hemmady-Wright and Varsha Hemmady-Wright, her brothers Nitin Hemmady (Weiwen) and Amit Patel (Vaishali), and her niblings Vishal Patel, Meridith Embry, Sahil Patel and Anishi Patel, as well as a large chosen family and a long line of co-organizers who’ve learned from her and struggled alongside her. Amisha is preceded in death by her father Arvind Patel.

Amisha was born in Chicago in 1975, and moved to California at 18 for college. At 19, she got her first taste of community organizing, working with other students to found an environmental justice organization focused on youth of color, joining together to fight a toxic waste facility in East Palo Alto, California. Amisha writes of this campaign, “It was my first experience connecting my individual sense of power to growing collective power.”

Growing collective power became Amisha’s life’s work, battling oppression through forging connections and building solidarities. After graduation, she became involved in South Asian LGBTQ justice organizing, and spent years leading arts-based prevention programming to end violence against women.

When Amisha moved to Chicago, she proceeded to take it by storm–and, to quote Andrea Gibson, one of Amisha’s favorite poets, “by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers on the side of the road.” She organized hospital employees and Head Start workers, helping them unionize. She worked with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 to build power across sectoral, racial, and class lines. She supported a statewide campaign for driver’s licenses for immigrants and a Chicago ordinance demanding a living wage for employees of big box stores.

In 2007, Amisha brought her spirit of radical connection-building to her role as executive director of the Grassroots Collaborative (GC), a coalition of organizations committed to building community power toward economic and racial justice. Throughout the next decade and a half, Amisha led GC in a series of large-scale campaigns that achieved tangible wins for working people–and dramatically transformed the horizon of possibility for organizing in Chicago. Her unwavering commitment to racial and economic justice, alongside her deep emphasis on popular education to build a shared political analysis, allowed activists to nurture strong relationships across organizational and neighborhood lines.

In 2009, Amisha co-led the official launch of the long-running fight to tax the wealthy in Illinois, challenging efforts by the legislature to cut back on critical social services. The campaign organized 9,000 Illinoisans to converge on the state capital, while others joined more than 100 protests spread across the state, demanding a budget that prioritized Illinois’s most crucial social programs. Amisha coordinated a hunger strike in Springfield, calling the people of Illinois to look stark inequities in the eye–and to feel empowered to act against them.

Amisha delighted in making organizing fun. She brought art, props, and political theater strategies into the work. An artist herself, Amisha used visual tactics like a spray-painted “Golden Toilet” to call attention to the Chicago Board of Trade’s request for millions of taxpayer “TIF” funds to rehab their bathrooms. She and her team held a “Bake Sale for Billionaires” outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Headquarters, suggesting that if the world’s biggest futures trading center was pursuing public tax dollars that were originally intended for low-income communities, they must be really struggling. The effort succeeded–the Board of Trade returned those subsidies! Other wins quickly followed, resulting in CNA Group, Bank of America, and United Airlines all returning their corporate handouts.

As public school administrators across the country became enamored with privatization and began diverting public school funds to corporate-run private charters, Amisha led her organization in fighting back. From the game-changing Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012, in which GC provided coalitional backup to fortify that successful struggle, to the campaigns to stop school closings and limit charter schools and vouchers for private schools, Amisha challenged privatization at every turn, with clear-eyed strategy and her full heart.

Throughout her organizing Amisha had an amazing ability to bring people together. She helped convene large-scale public gatherings that brought together communities across neighborhood and racial divides to reimagine what democratic participation could look like in Chicago, from the massive “People’s City Council” to packed Mayoral forums. She played a key role in coalitional efforts such as Take Back Chicago, advancing a vision of multiracial, working-class power.

In 2014, Amisha co-led a coalition that successfully out-organized then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel to win a City Council ordinance to raise Chicago’s minimum wage to $13/hr by 2019.