The Invisible Institute arose out of the work of executive director Jamie Kalven during the final chapter of high-rise public housing in Chicago. From 1994 until the final demolition in 2007, Kalven’s base of operations was the Stateway Gardens public housing development, said on the basis of the 1990 census to be the single poorest community in the nation. Kalven had several roles there. He established a program of "grassroots public works" aimed at creating alternatives for ex-offenders and members of street gangs. He served as advisor to the resident council, participating in negotiations with the Chicago Housing Authority, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and private developers. And he practiced a form of human rights documentation that Studs Terkel once characterized as "guerrilla journalism."

In those years, the name “Invisible Institute” referred not to an organization but to a loose network of collaborators and a certain style of inquiry, exploration, and relationship-building. Central to that style of approach is the recognition that we urgently need to have public and private conversations about the constellation of issues we refer to by the shorthand “race,” yet we have neither the relationships nor the common language to sustain those conversations. It follows that the priority is to build the necessary relationships and to recover the power of language. That orientation continues to animate the work of the Invisible Institute.

At every stage in its evolution, the Invisible Institute has sought to create capacity through collaboration. A prime example is its partnership over the last fifteen years with civil rights attorneys and law students at the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School. The Mandel Clinic brought six federal civil rights suits on behalf on public housing residents and represented Kalven in a case that in 2014 yielded a landmark decision establishing that in Illinois police misconduct files are public information.

Following the decision in Kalven v. Chicago, the Invisible Institute incorporated as a non-profit organization and staffed up in order to respond to the historic opportunity presented by the release of information long hidden behind a wall of official secrecy.

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