Chrissy Mancini Nichols

Chrissy joined the Metropolitan Planning Council in 2009 as the manager of fiscal policy.  She was promoted in 2012 to program director, leading MPC’s transportation and infrastructure finance initiatives; and in 2014 to director of research and evaluation.  As the first person to hold this role at MPC, Chrissy is expanding MPC’s research capacity, working across the organization and with partners in business, government, academia and the civic sector to develop and execute MPC’s extensive research agenda to advance MPC’s initiatives and policy goals.  

Recognizing the importance of showing impact, Chrissy is quantifying how all of MPC’s projects help make the Chicago region the best place to live and work in the country.  Measures include job creation, lowering housing cost burden, creating more development near transit, dollars saved from government collaboration and leveraging private investment.

Chrissy serves on the North Lake Shore Drive Corridor Planning Committee.  She staffed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Transportation and Infrastructure transition committee and the Midway Advisory Panel that evaluated a potential public-private partnership at Midway Airport, the first of its kind in the nation.  Chrissy also was appointed to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s Technical Advisory Group on the Fiscal and Economic Impacts of Development Decisions.

Prior to joining MPC, Chrissy was the associate executive director of a Chicago-based fiscal policy think tank, where she worked on tax, budget and education funding policies, including drafting legislation to reform Illinois’ education and tax systems and modeling its impacts. She was appointed by the Illinois General Assembly as technical advisor to the Task Force on Economic and Workforce Development, Joint Committee on Property Tax and School Funding Reform, Senate Education committee, and House and Senate Revenue committees. 

Chrissy also served as a management analyst at the U.S. Dept. of Education and was a seventh-grade teacher in Washington, D.C. She was awarded the Northwestern University Graduate School’s Distinguished Thesis Award for The Implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in Illinois, which analyzed each component of NCLB compared with state and federal fiscal policies to find how tax policy affects the implementation of the law at the local level.