Lilly Cruz (she/hers/ella)

Born and raised in Chicago, Lilly Cruz (she/hers/ella) is a proud Boricua whose work lives at the intersection of education, cultura and social justice. She has over 20 years of equity-centered, education and nonprofit leadership experience that is grounded in liberatory practices and outcomes for historically marginalized young people and families in Chicago and beyond, at the systems level, through school-based leadership and within community spaces.

Lilly has deep roots in Chicago Public Schools as a former middle school teacher, residency site director, assistant principal and Central Office leader in the Department of Student Voice & Engagement. She also has a national landscape perspective through her systems work with Leading Educators, where she worked with school districts across the country to support their programming for teachers and school leaders around leadership, coaching, equity, literacy and math. And in 2020, Lilly founded El Griot & Areito Project, a grassroots collective of mostly Chicago educators, young people and families who curate and offer learning experiences around ethnic studies through creativity, stories and healing.

Lilly’s lived experiences as a Chicago Public School student also influence her work. Her exposure to and engagement in the arts in elementary school led her to audition and get accepted into the Drama Major Program at Lincoln Park High School. Both of these experiences influenced her arts integration approach as a literary arts teacher and with the community-created Teaching the Story of the Chicago Young Lords curriculum, which she facilitated through El Griot & Areito Project.

Lilly is an Umuwi Ethnic Studies Program Advisory Board Member, 2020 Surge Institute Alumna and was recently published in ReThinking Schools for her article – The Story of the Chicago Young Lords for Teachers. Lilly lives in the South Shore community with her family which includes her partner, two teenage daughters, a rescue cat and lots of plants.

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