Colleen McGaughey is the senior manager of institutional advancement at the Chicago History Museum, where she oversees government, foundation, and corporate grants. During her more than 20-year career in nonprofit development, she has played a key role in diverse grant-funded initiatives ranging from HIV prevention and hunger relief to adult literacy instruction and museum exhibitions. She has authored hundreds of proposals grounded in research and driven by mission. Her practice involves program planning and evaluation strategies as essential phases of fundraising. She has a BA in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago and an MA in liberal studies from Northwestern University and insists both prove useful in her work.
John Russick is the senior vice president of the Chicago History Museum where he oversees the departments of collections and curatorial affairs, exhibitions, communications, and the Museum’s Research Center. His latest digital initiative, the Chicago 00 Project, is a collection of interactive augmented and virtual reality experiences that showcase the Museum’s film, photo, and sound archive, winning a MUSE award in 2018 and a Chicago Innovation award in 2019. His most recent publication, "The Museum Inside Out" was published in the January/February 2020 issue of the American Alliance of Museum's magazine. Other publications include, "A Place for Everything: Museum Collections, Technology, and the Power of Place,”(Medium, 2014) and "Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions" (Left Coast Press, 2010). He served as a program advisor on the 2011 Florentine Films documentary, Prohibition, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Since 2008, he has organized the American Alliance of Museum’s annual Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing Competition.
