Amarachuku C. Enyia, known as Amara Enyia, is an American strategist, politician, community organizer, and municipal consultant. She is the policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives; the chairwoman of the International Civil Society Working Group (ICSWG) of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent; and a senior advisor to the Institute On Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School. She has also worked as the director of Chicago's Austin Chamber of Commerce; the interim village manager of University Park, Illinois; and chief executive officer of ACE Municipal Partners, a municipal consulting firm. Enyia was a candidate for mayor of Chicago in 2015 and 2019, receiving 8% of the vote in the first round of the latter election.
Enyia is regarded to be a political progressive.
Early life and education
Enyia's parents were born in Nigeria and migrated to the United States in the 1970s. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in University Park, Illinois, where she attended Crete-Monee High School. Her father was a professor at Governors State University. She attended graduate school and law school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received a Master of Education in 2008, a J.D. in 2009, and a PhD in Educational Policy Studies in 2010. At the University of Illinois, Enyia worked as a reporter, development editor and editor-in-chief for Illini Media.
Policy work and community organizing
Enyia worked in the policy department of the Chicago mayor's office from 2009 until the end of Mayor Richard M. Daley's term in May 2011. In this fellowship she worked on a variety of matters, including ones related to transportation and ecumenic development.
After her fellowship in Daley's office, she worked as a community organizer in Chicago's West Side. In April 2011, she was hired as the executive director of Austin Coming Together, an umbrella organization that promotes coordination and collaboration between community and nonprofit organizations in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. She spent roughly a year in this position. During her time as executive director of Austin Coming Together, she was also part of the Community Action Councils, which assisted the Chicago Public Schools to develop an educational strategy in the city's communities. She also founded ACE Municipal Partners, a consulting firm that works with municipal officials. In 2013, Enyia began working as the director of the Austin Chamber of Commerce. She held this position until 2019, when she stepped down amid her second campaign for mayor of Chicago. Enyia also blogged about local government affairs under the pseudonym "The Municipal Maven."
Having aborted a campaign for mayor of Chicago months earlier, in September 2015, Enyia formed an exploratory committee to look at launching a possible primary election challenge to longtime incumbent Democratic congressman Danny Davis in 2016. In November 2015, she had announced that would not be challenging Davis and that she would instead be collaborating with Davis to establish a new youth initiative called the "Bridge program" that would partner local youth with elected officials and community stakeholders with expertise. The aim of the program was to increase youth engagement in political organizing. In late-2015, Enyia, in partnership with Congressman Davis, launched the Bridge initiative in the Austin neighborhood.
Enyia was one of eight co-authors of the 2016 book Chicago Isn't Broke: Funding the City We Deserve, the main author of which was former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson. Enyia also worked as a policy director for the Chicago Pincipals and Administrators Association.
In May 2017, Enyia took a job as the interim village manager of University Park, Illinois. Her brief tenure as interim village manager was later reported to have been troublesome, with a dispute taking place between her and the village surrounding what her salary should be, and some village trustees criticizing her during her tenure for doing what they regarded to be an insufficient amount of work. The village's mayor Vivian Covington praised the value of Eniya's legal expertise, despite critics in the village arguing it was limited in value by the fact she was not a practicing attorney. In August 2017, her tenure ended.