ELPC’s Board

Ellen C. Craig is a Former Chair of ELPC’s Board of Directors and is a telecommunications and utility consultant and a Senior Advisor to The Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm. Previously, she was Vice President for Regulatory Affairs at a national telecommunications company. Ms. Craig is an attorney who has served as the Chairman and Commissioner of the Illinois Commerce Commission, and as the Deputy Chief of Staff to Illinois Governor James R. Thompson. Ms. Craig is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission and the Metropolitan Planning Council.

Richard Day is a Former Chair of ELPC’s Board of Directors. Mr. Day is President of Richard Day Research, a full-service opinion, market and public policy research firm based in Evanston, Illinois. Mr. Day conducts a wide range of customer research for financial service and pharmaceutical companies, as well as survey research and strategic consulting for clients seeking to strengthen their position on public policy issues. He has provided voting research and election night commentary for Channel 7 ABC-TV in Chicago for 20 years. Mr. Day is the past Chair of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations and serves as a Board member of the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Harry Drucker is Chair of ELPC’s Board of Directors.  He is the President and Founder of Revere Corp., a real estate advisory, investment and property management company. Mr. Drucker specializes in the development and management of multi-unit residential housing in downtown Chicago. Since 1994, he has served as a Trustee on the Illinois Board of The Nature Conservancy. In 1996, Mr. Drucker founded the Friends of the Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the economic redevelopment and environmental preservation of the former Savanna Army Depot in Illinois. Since 2001, Mr. Drucker has been a commissioner of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission (Chair from 2004-2006).

Robert L. Graham is the Chair of the Board’s Nominating Committee and is the founder and Chair of Jenner & Block’s Environmental, Energy and Natural Resources Law Practice. Mr. Graham is an experienced environmental attorney who practices before federal and state courts and regulatory agencies across the country. He also teaches environmental law at Northwestern University School of Law. Mr. Graham served as the Chair of the Environmental Law & Policy Center’s Board of Directors from 1998 to 2003, is a past President of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, and is a delegate to the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates.

Howard A. Learner is an experienced attorney serving as the President and Executive Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center. Mr. Learner is responsible for the overall strategic policy direction, development and leadership of this public interest organization. Before founding ELPC, he was the General Counsel of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a public interest law center, specializing in complex civil litigation and policy development. Mr. Learner is an Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University Law School, teaching an advanced environmental law seminar.

Daniel Levin is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors. Mr. Levin is the Chairman of The Habitat Company, a real estate developer in Chicago and other areas of the country since 1957. He has been active in development and management activities involving more than 15,000 residential units, and has been principally responsible for the financing, structuring, and equity syndication of all developments. In 1987, Mr. Levin and The Habitat Company were appointed Receiver of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Scattered Site housing development program. Mr. Levin is also the Managing General Partner of the East Bank Club in Chicago, which is considered the finest physical fitness and social facility in the country. Mr. Levin is a member of the Visiting Committee of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, a Trustee of WTTW, the Chicago public television station, and a member of the IIT College of Architecture Board of Overseers.

Lois Lipton is an experienced litigation attorney and the most recent past Chair of the Board of the Chicago Foundation for Women. She was previously an attorney for AT&T after beginning her career as a staff attorney for the ACLU in Chicago working on high-profile civil liberties case. Ms. Lipton became the first director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Rights Project, working on abortion rights litigation, and early landmark cases involving in vitro fertilization and a woman’s right to receive medical fertility assistance after age 35. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Boards of Directors of the ACLU of Illinois and the Chicago Foundation for Women, and has served on many professional boards and public committees.

Nancy Loeb is the Treasurer of the Board of Directors. Ms. Loeb is an experienced attorney and was recently the General Counsel & Corporate Secretary for Takeda Pharmaceuticals, N.A.. She was previously the Vice President and General Counsel for Honeywell International’s Automation and Control Solutions division based in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and before then, she worked as a deputy general counsel at Allied Signal Co. and as counsel at General Electric Co., where she specialized in antitrust matters. Following law school, she served as a law clerk for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Philadelphia), worked as a legal fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and practiced law as an associate for three years at the Arnold & Porter law firm. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing.

William F. McCalpin is the Independent Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Janus Funds, a family of approximately 70 mutual funds with collectively more than $65 billion in assets, and the Independent Chairman of the family of four mutual funds offered by The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF) Investment Program, with assets totaling $2.3 billion.  Mr. McCalpin helped to found the TIFF funds, which are open exclusively to foundations and other nonprofit organizations, in the early 1990s and served as a director of them from 1994 to 1998 before rejoining the board in 2008. Over a period of more than 20 years, he also served in a variety of capacities at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Most recently, Mr. McCalpin was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.  For much of the 1990s, he was a member of the investments staff of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and directed the Foundation’s investments related to program initiative. 

Bob J. Nash recently served as the Deputy Campaign Manager for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Previously, he was Vice Chairman of Shorebank Corporation, the country’s first and largest community development bank, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for ShoreBank Enterprise Group, Cleveland and ShoreBank Enterprise Detroit. Mr. Nash previously served President Bill Clinton as Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel and, before then, as the Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Small Community and Rural Development. He served as the President of the Arkansas State Development Finance Authority and as the Senior Economic Development Assistant to the Governor. Mr. Nash is the Board Chair for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and on the Boards of Mercy Housing (Denver) and the South Side YMCA (Chicago).

Rip Rapson is the Chief Executive Officer and President of the Kresge Foundation, a $3.2 billion foundation located in Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Rapson previously served for six years as President of the McKnight Foundation, Minnesota’s largest foundation, was a senoir fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Design Center for American Urban Landscape, and was a consultant with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based philanthropic organization known for its work with children, families, and communities. Mr. Rapson is a former Deputy Mayor of Minneapolis, after his private law practice with Leonard Street and Deinard, where he was a partner in the litigation department. Before his legal training at Columbia University Law School, Mr. Rapson served for four years as a legislative assistant in the Washington office of U.S. Representative Donald Fraser where he was deeply engaged in the legislation creating the Boundary Water National Conservation Area.

Smita Shah is the Founder and President of SPAAN Technology, a professional engineering firm, based in Chicago, which provides construction management, project management and facility/technology services for major corporations and public agencies. She previously worked for the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States before receiving her Masters of Science degree in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ms. Shah was a delegate at the 1996 and 2004 Democratic National Conventions and was on the Rules Committee in 2000 and 2004. She is the chair of the Chicago-Delhi Sister City Committee and serves on the Boards of Directors of the Illinois Arts Council, Christopher House, Loyola University of Chicago and Steppenwolf Theatre.

David Wilhelm is the Founder and President of Woodland Venture Management, a company that raises and invests private equity in parts of the country that are underserved by the nation’s financial industry. Woodland has become one of the nation’s leading sources of capital in the Midwest and central Appalachia. In that capacity, Wilhelm founded Adena Ventures, a venture capital fund targeting central Appalachia, which includes the southeastern Ohio area in which he was raised. Wilhelm is a partner and member of the fund’s investment committee. Wilhelm also founded a second fund, Hopewell Ventures, which brings investment dollars to entrepreneurs in the nation’s heartland, specifically a seven-state region stretching from Ohio to Nebraska. Wilhelm is best known for his political work, which has included managing campaigns for President Bill Clinton, Senator Paul Simon, Senator Joe Biden, Governor Rod Blagojevich, and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. In 1993, he became the youngest ever Chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Brady C. Williamson is a partner with the LaFollette, Godfrey & Kahn law firm. His practice in Madison and Milwaukee involves several disciplines, including the Financial and Business Restructuring and Litigation Practice Groups. He is also a member of the firm’s Government Relations Practice Group, which focuses on election and campaign finance law, and he heads the firm’s Media Law Group, which represents newspapers, magazines, ISPs and radio and television stations statewide and regionally. Mr. Williamson also is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, teaching courses on state and federal constitutional law, campaign finance and election law.

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Robert B. Wilcox is the founding Chair of the Board of Directors, and now serves as the Chair of the Environmental Law and Policy Center’s Advisory Council. Mr. Wilcox is an attorney and a former insurance regulator and insurance industry executive who has also served in numerous public and governmental capacities including Chair of the Mayor’s (Chicago) Task Force on Energy (1986-89) and Director of Insurance for the State of Illinois (1974-76). He has extensive experience with the operations and policies of nonprofit organizations from his previous board service: the former President of the Board and a Director of the Chicago Educational Television Association (WTTW/Channel 11); Chair of the Board of WFMT fine arts radio station; President and Director of the Community Renewal Society; and President and Director of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.