Becky Betts is the chief marketing and external affairs officer at A Better Chicago. In this role, Becky leads the organization’s marketing and communications, strategic partnerships, and development work. She seeks to elevate A Better Chicago’s brand at the local and national levels while maintaining and cultivating relationships across sectors to garner the resources required to achieve A Better Chicago’s mission to fight poverty with opportunity.

Becky’s track record for developing and implementing innovative social impact initiatives includes launching Chicago CRED—a foundation focused on reducing gun violence through philanthropy, direct service programs, community engagement, and advocacy—with former United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. As chief of staff, Becky led the creation of a direct service, anti-violence program and established collaborative partnerships with city agencies and community-based nonprofits to enable rapid expansion, including employment of more than 5,000 high school students each summer through the One Summer program. On the advocacy side, she led initiatives to engage young adults from Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods in local and national conversations around gun violence prevention. Prior to her time at Chicago CRED, Becky provided strategic guidance to a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies as a management consultant with PwC and A.T. Kearney.

Becky is on the board of directors for Advance Illinois, a nonprofit policy and advocacy organization that works towards building a healthy public education system for Illinois. She also serves on the board of Fishtank Learning, a national nonprofit focused on providing high-quality instructional content for K-12 educators. Becky holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.