Amisha Patel had a credo: Even if the ground is uncertain and shaky, you don’t get stuck.
It was true in City Hall budget fights. It was true in uphill union organizing battles.
It was true at the start of her relationship with Neena Hemmady, and during their Hindu wedding ceremony, which came two years after Patel’s cancer diagnosis, Hemmady said.
The way Patel, who died Friday at 50, lived her life offers a lesson to the Chicago progressive movement she fostered, Hemmady said.
“You move forward and make decisions, but do it with people, don’t ever think that you’re doing this by yourself,” she said.
Leaders of the city’s political left credited Patel with uniting community groups and labor unions by fostering deep personal relationships. Her work helped create the working-class movement that made Mayor Brandon Johnson’s election possible, they argued.
Johnson, who is expected to eulogize Patel at her funeral Saturday, praised her work as a senior adviser to his mayoral transition committee, calling Patel a “dear friend” and her death “a profound loss.”
“Amisha will be remembered for her dedication to our communities and for her tireless work in building a movement that will inspire generations of Chicagoans to come,” he wrote.
Born in Chicago and raised in the city’s west suburbs, Patel learned from a doctor at just 15 that she faced a high risk of developing the endometrial cancer that killed her, she wrote in the progressive news outlet Truthout last month.
The threat hanging over her, she thought for years she would become a genetic engineer. She wanted a remedy. And she landed on one when she started an environmental justice organization for young people of color as a Stanford University student.
“How do we live a healthy life and be treated with dignity? That was the cure to cancer,” Hemmady said. “She started to put her energy there, and organizing became her love language.”
Patel returned to Chicago and became an organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 73.
There she met Stacy Davis Gates. Now the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Davis Gates was then a stranger to union work teaching Black history at Englewood High School, slated to be shut down.
Patel began organizing at the school, slowly building trust with students and support staff members, Davis Gates said. It was easy to believe her: She asked the right questions, listened and knew how to move people, the union president said.
“She asked you what your dream was and how she could be a part of organizing and reimagining with you — not for you, but with you,” Davis Gates said. “She showed me that we did not have to summarily sit down for school closings just because the powerful political machine said that they were going to close schools.”
In 2007, Patel became the executive director of Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of labor and community groups she led for 15 years. All the while, she played a key role in the city’s biggest fights for progressive policy.
Patel led a push to raise the Illinois minimum wage, garnered outside support for the CTU’s pivotal 2012 teachers strike and fought for higher wages at box stores in Chicago, eliciting the only veto issued by former Mayor Richard M. Daley in 22 years in office.
In her repeated push for tax increment financing money to go toward schools, libraries and mental health clinics instead of the businesses and developers it typically supports, she even spray-painted a toilet gold and marched it with a group to CME Group’s headquarters.
The message was heard: The trading market company decided to not accept $15 million in taxpayer funds slated in part to renovate restrooms that it had won under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration.
Over a decade later, the spirit of that push has become a core policy for Johnson, who persuaded aldermen to support a record $1 billion TIF surplus that yielded $572 million for Chicago Public Schools and $233 million for the city.
In the past decade, Patel was “irrefutably” the foundation of budget ideas from the city’s left, senior Johnson adviser Kennedy Bartley said.
Bartley, who met Patel while building out the policy initiatives of the United Working Families political group, said Patel taught her a phrase: “with abandon.” Patel lived with “a radical, uninhibited rigor” and spent her last days on “this project,” Bartley said.
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“It could be reduced to a political project, but I think that was the project of how to live your life,” Bartley said. “She named her needs and said what she wanted to say. … I think what she was trying to teach us was not to wait until then.”
Hemmady said her wife “deeply believes in funding public institutions.” Her mission came from a simple understanding, Hemmady added: “There are ways that, if we were to have different policies, people would not have to struggle so much.”
Her strong beliefs touched every part of her life, from the space she gave to her children to advocate for themselves to her efforts to “organize” against her cancer, Hemmady said. She “just had integrity running through every cell of her body,” she added.
“It was integrating all the parts to be fully human,” Hemmady said. “And it took a while to get there, you know, I wish it could have been faster, but we got there.”
Two weeks before her death, Patel gathered around two dozen friends. Leaders of the city’s progressive movement filled her Rogers Park home.
She had been “tremendously proud” of Johnson’s mayoral victory, Hemmady said. She wanted to make sure the movement she spent her life building did not go backwards after her death.
Davis Gates heard her say that “all we needed is interconnected.” Bartley left thinking about Patel’s decision to dedicate her life to the work.
And Hemmady clung to the advice on why the work left to be done, that work Patel said must be done together, matters.
“Don’t forget who this work is for,” she recalled hearing. “It is always about our people.”