Summary
Clients: Chicago Office of the Mayor
Collaborators: The Obama Foundation, Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative
Project: A stakeholder engagement to help the City of Chicago ensure that South Side communities, businesses, and cultural institutions benefit from the tourism influx from the new Obama Presidential Center, gathering community-grounded feedback to shape a coordinated tourism strategy.
Outcome: A synthesis of community and City input on how to maximize the neighborhood benefits of the Obama Presidential Center, capturing the initiatives eight City departments and agencies already have underway and the ideas South Side stakeholders want prioritized. Grounded in a 67-person stakeholder session at the South Shore Cultural Center, it delivers a report-out organized around four themes (connectivity and transit access, community integration and economic benefit, public space enhancements, and cross-cutting ideas) that the City can act on to ensure all benefit from the Obama Presidential Center tourism.
Opportunity
The Obama Presidential Center is expected to draw 600,000 visitors a year to Chicago's South Side. That kind of influx is a rare economic opportunity, but only if the surrounding neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural institutions capture the benefit rather than watching visitors flow in and out of a single site. The City wanted to make sure the tourism wave lifted the whole South Side.
To do that, the City needed to hear directly from the community. In collaboration with the Mayor's Office, The Obama Foundation, and the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, CCA helped convene South Side stakeholders to react to the City's planned initiatives and generate ideas for connecting the Center's visitors to the neighborhoods around it.
Action
CCA supported a community stakeholder session and synthesized the input into an actionable report.
“The Obama Presidential Center is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the South Side and the people, neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural institutions that make the area so special. Thanks to Civic Consulting Alliance for helping to put community voices at the center of that plan.”
Discover: CCA helped convene 67 participants (31 guests representing 22 community organizations, alongside 27 City department and agency staff) at the South Shore Cultural Center in September 2025, creating a forum for the community to weigh in.
Design: The session surfaced the initiatives eight City departments and agencies already have planned, from Metra's 59th/60th Street station reconstruction and CDOT's Jackson Park mobility improvements, to the new Chicago Public Library Obama Branch, and gathered stakeholder reactions and new ideas.
Deliver: CCA synthesized the feedback into a report-out organized around four themes: connectivity and transit access, community integration and economic benefit, public space enhancements, and a set of cross-cutting ideas.
Impact
Grounding the tourism strategy in community voice helps ensure that the economic benefits of a landmark investment reach the residents who have waited longest for them.
The City came away with a clear, community-grounded picture of what South Side stakeholders most want as the Obama Presidential Center opens, better transit connections and wayfinding, ways to drive visitors into local commercial corridors and cultural institutions, and streetscape and public-space improvements that make neighborhoods worth lingering in.
The report-out gave City departments a shared record of both their planned initiatives and the community's priorities and suggestions. By capturing community priorities alongside the City's planned investments in one place, the report gives departments and agencies a reference point to coordinate their work, and to keep directing tourism into the South Side's commercial corridors, cultural institutions, and neighborhoods rather than a single destination.
This work supported the City's broader effort to prepare the South Side for the 2026 opening of the Obama Presidential Center, building on earlier planning for a South Side tourism strategy.
Photo courtesy of The Obama Foundation
