Executive Director
Press Forward Chicago
Tracy Baim is executive director of Press Forward Chicago, a pooled fund for community journalism based at The Chicago Community Trust. Baim is co-founder and owner of Windy City Times. She is former publisher of the Chicago Reader newspaper. Baim has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Chicago Headline Club and the Chicago Journalists Association. In 2014, she was inducted into the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame. She is also in the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. She has won numerous LGBTQ community and journalism honors, including the Community Media Workshop’s Studs Terkel Award in 2005 and the Lambda Legal Bon Foster Award in 2023. Baim has written and/or edited 14 books, her newest is Liberating Healthcare, a biography of Howard Brown Health.
Chicago in Focus: Building Bridges With Independent Voices
Monday, March 30, 2026
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT