Marisa Novara

Marisa Novara is the vice president of Community Impact at The Chicago Community Trust.

As the Vice President of Community Impact for The Chicago Community Trust, Marisa (ma-ree-sa) Novara leads the team overseeing the development and implementation of the Trust’s strategic initiatives, policy agenda, and grantmaking to address the Chicago area’s racial and ethnic wealth gap. She has more than 25 years of experience engaging with communities to create innovative programs that respond to their needs and drive policy change. With experience in the nonprofit and government sectors, she has worked to address barriers to economic opportunity facing Chicago communities and built partnerships across sectors in pursuit of lasting change. Most recently, Marisa served as Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Housing. She led the passage of nine bills in four years, including efforts to increase opportunities for developers and contractors of color to participate in and build wealth by creating affordable housing. 

Before joining the City, Novara was vice president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, where she designed and managed the Cost of Segregation project, which concluded how decades-old racial and economic segregation patterns cost the Chicago region an estimated $4.4 billion in additional income each year. She also led the subsequent creation of the region’s first comprehensive guide to a more racially equitable future. Before that, Novara directed affordable rental and for-sale housing development for Lawndale Christian Development Corp. in the North Lawndale community, where she lived and worked for more than a decade.  

Novara has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in sociology, master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, certificate in affordable housing finance, development, and management from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and master’s in urban planning from the Istituto Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy.