Santiago Ginebra Campillo, a student at Harris receiving his MPP at the end of the 2023-24 academic year, has played an essential role on the Center for Effective Government (CEG) team. Working as a Graduate Student Assistant for the majority of his degree program, as well as being a Board Member of the Harris Student Organization "Latin America Matters,” Ginebra Campillo has helped shape initiatives at CEG, as well as serving as a key liaison between the Center and the Harris student community.
When asked about why he sought out a role at CEG, Ginebra Campillo cites his professional experience. With his previous work as a Legislative Counsel at the Mexican Senate, as well his commitment to public policy through his degree program, Ginebra Campillo found himself at the intersection of politics and policy–and he wanted to find others working to bridge the gap between those two fields. That goal drove him toward CEG, where scholarship on public policy issues combines with a network of leading practitioners to catalyze evidence-based democratic reform.
“[Harris students] see the Center for Effective Government thanks to the Lunch ‘n Learn activities with the Democracy Fellows, the opportunity to sit down and get what practitioners are doing or saying or what the next steps are going to be in certain policy issues,” said Ginebra Campillo. “It’s the opportunity for important practitioners to show you the way. Like hey, most of these people studied public policy. Or they studied law. Or something similar to people who are within my cohort. And it’s very important to see–if you already know where you want to go–how to get there.”
During his time at CEG, one of Ginebra Campillo’s central initiatives was organizing the Alderperson Orientation, which offered new alderpersons in Chicago a wide-ranging training session on policy and governance issues, led by scholars and experts from the field. Ginebra Campillo notes that this program built on the experience he’d gained supporting elected officials in the Mexican Senate, but translated it into a US–and specifically Chicago–context. It also helped give these alderpersons access to key policy information, so that they were better equipped to solve the pressing issues facing the city.
Reflecting on the Alderperson Orientation, Ginebra Campillo says: “I got the opportunity to see that problems that were happening in Mexico City were very similar to the ones happening in the city of Chicago. In the end, both cities are very large and they are very dynamic.”
Ginebra Campillo also attended a convening in DC with CEG Executive Director Sadia Sindhu, helping prepare talking points as CEG’s portfolio entered into conversation with the work that other democracy advocates and institutional reformers are doing across the country. After attending the convening, Ginebra Campillo says that he had a renewed understanding of how central CEG’s Civic Leadership Academy (CLA) was to the process of creating institutional reform.
“Working towards building that relationship between nonprofits, public servants in the city of Chicago, Cook County, and state level–trying to build that leadership within CLA…It made me feel very proud, being part of the Center for Effective Government within UChicago,” Ginebra Campillo says. “At the end, the people who are a part of CLA are people who are in leadership positions who have the potential to use the things that they’re learning [and] to put them to work in their own institutions. And it’s an exponential result.”
In his time at CEG, Ginebra Campillo has fulfilled a variety of roles. From organizing the Alderperson Orientation to helping facilitate events for CEG’s Democracy Fellowship program, from preparing talking points for convenings to providing support at the CLA 10th Anniversary celebration, Ginebra Campillo has shown the depth of his knowledge and experience about the challenges and possibilities in governance. More than that, he’s proved to be an indispensable bridge-builder in every role that he’s occupied. As a Mayoral Fellow at the City of Chicago, he cultivated relationships between the city and elected officials in Washington DC; at CEG he fostered greater connection between Harris students and the Center’s programming.
To Ginebra Campillo, this relational work seems to be fundamental to the question of governance: “I feel that democracy is about community,” he says. “And CEG has been, for me, the way to build that community.”