Marcia J. Lipetz

Marcia Lipetz was a leader in the nonprofit community of Chicago. She helped set up the Center on Halsted and in the 1980s, was the first full time executive director at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago as well as what was to become the Alphawood Foundation. She served on the board of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.^[1]

After spending 11 years at Alphawood, Lipetz became president and CEO of the Executive Services Corps of Chicago. She also did consulting at her own firm.^[2]

Biography

She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1947^[2] to parents who were social workers. She was immersed in tikkun olam, which is a Jewish concept of repairing the world. She graduated from Douglass Residential College (part of Rutgers University before earning a master's in sociology from Ohio State University and a doctorate in the same subject from Northwestern University.^[1]

Lipetz died September 11, 2018, at the age of 71 at her home in Evanston, Illinois, that she shared with her wife, Lynda Crawford. The cause of death was cancer.^[1]

Honors and awards

Lipetz was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2009^[3] because of her “leadership, energy, passion, and vision for Chicago’s LGBT community and the institutions affiliated with it, especially for her work with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the WPWR-TV Channel 50 Foundation, and Center on Halsted.”^[1]

Select Publications

• Snyder, D. S. (1981). [Review of Essential Sociology, by R. L. Ellis & M. J. Lipetz]. Teaching Sociology, 8(4), 445–447. https://doi.org/10.2307/1317080

References