CHICAGO -- Today the Invisible Institute’s Board of Directors announced that Hilesh Patel, an experienced and highly regarded nonprofit leader who has worked in Chicago communities for more than two decades, will be the organization’s next executive director. He will succeed journalist Jamie Kalven, the Invisible Institute’s founder and executive director, in September. Jamie will continue his work as a journalist and member of the Invisible Institute team.
“We are thrilled to find in Hilesh an extraordinary leader and partner who can advance the work of the Invisible Institute,” said Sonny Garg, chair of the Invisible Institute’s board. “The entire board was struck by Hilesh’s unwavering belief in the mission of this organization.”
Most recently, Hilesh served as the Leadership Investment Program Officer at the Field Foundation of Illinois, where he built a leadership award program to recognize and support leaders across justice, art and media and storytelling in Chicago. Previously he served as deputy director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and was a Civic Leadership Academy Fellow at the University of Chicago.
During his career, Hilesh has also worked as a program manager, consultant, educator, artist and counselor. He is also a member of The Chicago ACT Collective, which builds political artistic collaboration and dialogue across communities. Across all his work, Hilesh integrates racial equity, civic engagement, and leadership development into the mission of his professional practices.
“I’m humbled and honored to be joining this exceptional team,” Hilesh said. “I’m excited to contribute to the growth of this organization as we amplify a tradition of human rights reporting and justice, both in Chicago and beyond our city.”
Hilesh enters the Woodlawn-based nonprofit journalism production company at a promising stage in its development, as the team Kalven has assembled builds on his life’s work. Most recently, journalists at the Invisible Institute won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for a yearlong investigation into the life-altering injuries caused by police dog bites. The Invisible Institute also earned widespread critical acclaim for its first podcast, Somebody, which was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting, among many other honors.
Among the nonprofit’s other program areas are the Youth/Police Project; The Citizens Police Data Project, the largest repository of police disciplinary records; Beneath the Surface, which investigates gender-based violence at the hands of police; and the Chicago Police Torture Archive, launched earlier this year. The Invisible Institute also maintains a wrongful conviction unit within its investigative reporting practice, which focuses on police misconduct as a contributing factor in innocence cases, and in mass incarceration more broadly.
“Hilesh’s commitment to maintaining respect for human rights through various forms of inquiry and storytelling coheres beautifully with our organizational values,” Jamie said. “I have every confidence that Hilesh will sustain the Invisible Institute by asking critical questions that will further advance our work to hold public institutions accountable.”
Before being established as a nonprofit in 2015, the Invisible Institute grew out of Kalven’s work during the final chapter of high-rise public housing in Chicago, from 1994-2007. During those years, he launched a human rights reporting project called The View From The Ground (now a monthly roundup of developments and analysis on issues central to the Invisible Institute’s work). Kalven also first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention in a 2015 Slate article, and he co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy-winning documentary on the McDonald case. In 2016, the Invisible Institute published a series titled “Code of Silence” by Jamie in The Intercept that exposed the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago police officers and has to date contributed to the exonerations of 87 individuals.
In the next phase of the Invisible Institute, Jamie will continue to support the creative work of colleagues.