Laura Thrall
President and CEO
Laura S. Thrall, President and Chief Executive Officer, United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, Inc., the largest non-governmental funder of health and human service programs in the region.
Ms. Thrall most recently served as Chief Executive Officer, YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, a human service agency with 160 employees serving over 130,000 people annually through economic empowerment programs, early childhood services and rape crisis services. As CEO of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, she led its transformation, developing the concept for the “Model YWCA,” opening the first of four planned new centers, launching its first capital campaign in 40 years and creating an infrastructure for sustained legislative advocacy.
Prior to joining the YWCA, Thrall was a division director of Campbell & Company, a leading national consulting firm specializing in providing counsel to large nonprofits, where she worked with clients such as the University of Notre Dame, National PTA in Chicago, National Children’s Museum, and Children’s National Medical Center, both in Washington, D.C., among others. Before that she served as senior director at Los Angeles-based Starlight Children’s Foundation International.
Ms. Thrall has served in leadership roles at a number of nonprofit organizations, including as immediate past board chair for the Chicago Alliance for Collaborative Effort (CACE) and currently as a founding board member of its Back Office Cooperative. She was a founding member of Illinois Partners for the Common Good; a legislative coalition comprised of the largest health and human service providers in Illinois. Ms. Thrall chairs the Donors Forum Public/Nonprofit Partnership Initiative Policy Forum and is an appointed member of the Visiting Committee for the Biological Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.
Laura holds a Master’s degree with distinction in Public Service Management from DePaul University in Chicago. A 26-year resident of Chicago, she has two adult children now residing in New York.
