I got to speak with Karen Lewis for my first Crain's story. She told me about being nervous for a visit to House Speaker Mike Madigan's office after SB7 passed. I said I was surprised to hear her say that – she was always presented as the dynamo that scared everybody else. 1/x

"I don’t buy into any of that stuff about me, I don’t think any of that’s true. I don’t think of myself hardly as a dynamo," Lewis said. "That doesn’t mean I’m never scared. There are certain things I’m terrified of."

What? "I was a little nervous about Madigan because I didn’t want to mess anything up for us. I wanted to make sure our members didn’t have any consequences because of my behavior."

She spoke at length about bargaining for the common good, about how it built trust among people outside schools who had little faith in big institutions. She talked about the importance of having Black women in leadership, and "tikkun olam," repairing the world.

"If we all do our parts at healing the world, we should be in better space. For me that’s spiritual... It’s more about me being sure that what we do affects other people, that’s a mitzvah," she said.

Here's that story about @stacydavisgates –  https://www.chicagobusiness.com/education/meet-firebrand-stoking-ctus-flammable-rhetoric

And @GregHinz's profile of Karen Lewis – polyglot, cook, opera and film buff: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130810/ISSUE01/308109979/a-look-at-ctu-president-karen-lewis

"When Karen became president, she said we are going to transform our union in order to transform public education," Davis Gates said. "She delegated power. Not just to people in the office but to school communities. She trusted them to get it right."

SDG (in 2019): "Besides her boldness, her honesty, and if you’ve spoken with her, you know she’s absolutely brilliant, it was her trust in members that they could lead, speak to the issues, get it right, fight, and win stuff for their school communities."