About Cherie Travis

Cherie Travis is an attorney, but also a visionary. She is an advocate, but also a conceptualist. Where others see problems, she sees only possibilities. Where others see obstacles, she sees only solutions.

“I just feel like there’s so much that can be better in the world,” she said.

Cherie Travis, who is based in Chicago, lists her passions as being jobs, housing, animals and the environment, and strives to meet the challenges presented in each of those realms. When she sees homeless people living under viaducts, she wonders why they can’t be sheltered in the many abandoned buildings owned by the Chicago Housing Authority. When she considers the issue of youth violence in the Windy City, she advocates for programs that enable young people to pursue their passions, whether they involve athletics, music or the arts. In her mind, structure, expectations, accountability and positive role models can make all the difference.

Owner of several of rental properties in the city, Cherie Travis also developed some very definite ideas about ways landlord-tenant issues might be resolved. That’s particularly true in the case of rent payment, which came to the fore when the pandemic struck the U.S. in 2020. Too often tenants found themselves out of work and lacking the means to meet their financial obligations, and many municipalities responded by offering amnesty.

Cherie Travis believed there was a better way – mediation. She reached out to a nonprofit that offered such services, in the hope that landlords and tenants could find common ground.

“That, I thought, was the best solution – try to get people to talk to each other,” she said.

Cherie Travis served as the assistant general counsel for the Cook County Sheriff’s Department from 2013-16, and from 2009-12 was the executive director of the Commission on Animal Care and Control in Chicago. In the latter position, she made it her mission to pair animals with owners as quickly as possible by staging various events and forging partnerships with organizations like the Chicago White Sox baseball club and Chicago Wolves hockey team.

Significantly, she also spearheaded an initiative that enabled nonviolent inmates from the Cook County Jail to work early each morning within the facility, which she called a “phenomenal program” and “one of (her) proudest accomplishments.”

Her efforts at Animal Care and Control caught the attention of no less a public figure than Oprah Winfrey, who invited Cherie Travis to be a guest on her popular television show in 2010.

Cherie Travis, an Illinois native, also served as an adjunct law professor at Northwestern University from 2007-10, and at DePaul University from 2005-11. She had earned her law degree from DePaul, and prior to that had earned an undergrad degree in economics and a masters in advertising and marketing from the University of Illinois.

It was her father, an attorney himself, who encouraged her to pursue a law degree, and she saw the merit in that, as it enables one to gain a greater understanding of how various public and private institutions operate. That in turn makes it more possible to enact change.

That has become Cherie Travis’ mission in life, even though friends tell her she shouldn’t feel obligated to solve all the world’s problems.

“I feel like I do,” she said. “It is so hardwired into me.”