This event will be taking place on Zoom. For all Chicago Sinai Congregation members, please refer to your weekly email for the link and password. If you are not a member of Chicago Sinai Congregation, please email Emily Waife at ewaife@chicagosinai.org. Need help on Zoom- view more instructions here.

Edwin Eisendrath is a creative leader who has successfully innovated across the public, private, and independent sectors to get things done and to create value- social as well as economic. As CEO of Sun-Times Media, he saved a storied news brand. After leading the investor group to purchase the iconic but troubled paper along with the alternative weekly, Chicago Reader. Edwin led the company through rebranding, relocating, and restructuring, increasing diversity among its staff, and the sale of the Reader to a group of African American investors. He left the company in solid shape for the first time in decades, and it has since been sold to another group of local investors. More recently, Edwin helped launch Verifiable, a company that uses advanced technologies to provide real-time license verification and continuous monitoring of healthcare providers to increase efficiency and reduce compliance costs to hospitals and other health care organization.

Previously, as a Managing Director of the Huron Consulting Group and, later, as Managing Partner at
Stratesphere, he has helped clients on four continents achieve diverse missions during times of strategic
transition: a national library, an international bank, and several major research universities. Edwin left Huron
to form a partnership that worked with foreign governments, with an emphasis on the GCC, to transform the
relationship between Ministries, higher education, and the local economy.

Earlier in his career, the U.S. government tasked him to develop plans and lead the takeover and turnaround
of the Chicago Housing Authority, the nation’s third largest public housing authority, - the single largest
federal takeover of a local government in U.S. history. He oversaw efforts that led to a change in statutes that
allowed the dismantling of least viable large high-rise housing developments, the introduction of innovative
job training programming, and the transformation of public housing in Chicago. Meanwhile, as Regional
Director in charge of the Department’s programs in six U.S. states, he oversaw a reorganization of the
department. Prior to that he was twice elected to serve on Chicago’s City Council, and he taught in the city’s public
schools.
 

Anne Wedner, the founder of Kent Road Strategies, is currently also a Commissioner of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, a member of the Freedom House Board of Directors, an Advisor to the Roosevelt Foundation at Harvard University and a Board Member of OrganizingCorps2020.  She is formerly an elected Trustee of the Village of Winnetka; she has had deep involvement in developing the grassroots in Illinois’ Tenth Congressional District races and has advised both Democratic and Republican candidates on policies and campaigns.  Anne is a graduate of Harvard College and the Fletcher School at Tufts University and was posted in Paris, France and Caracas, Venezuela as a member of the Foreign Service early in her career.  Subsequent to her public service she served in account and sales management positions in advertising and marketing. Anne lives in Miami, Florida with her spouse Marcus Wedner.  Their two girls are all grown up.