Grace Hou

Organization - Secretary, Illinois Department of Human Services

County - State of Illinois

Grace B. Hou has served on Governor JB Pritzker’s Cabinet as the Secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) since March 2019. Grace also previously served as the Assistant Secretary at IDHS from 2003 to 2012, and during that time she was an architect of Illinois’ Immigrant Integration New American’s Gubernatorial Executive Order which was nationally recognized. Grace has dedicated her career to advancing equity and social justice by working in the non-profit and public sectors systems for change improvement through public policy development and implementation, social services provision, community organizing and engagement, and philanthropy. Grace most recently served as the President of Woods Fund Chicago from February 2012 to March 2019. Woods Fund Chicago is a bold grantmaking foundation that finds —and funds —projects that draw on the power of communities to fight the brutality of poverty and structural racism. She has served as the Executive Director of the Chinese Mutual Aid Association (CMAA) and as the Development Manager at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association where she became an advocate for immigrants’ rights. Grace is a child of immigrants from Taiwan, studied at the University of Illinois - Champaign and Springfield campuses, and has two teenage sons. She is on the board of the Healthy Communities Foundation and a board member of The Chicago Network; she is a 2001 Leadership Greater Chicago fellow, a member of The Commercial Club, and a German Marshall fellow. In her role as Secretary of IDHS, she chairs the Adult and Youth Redeploy Boards, chairs the Interagency Working Group on Poverty and Economic Security, co-chairs the Interagency Housing Working Group, and is a commissioner of the Early Childhood Funding Commission.