Gizelle Clemens

Gizelle L. Clemens (she/her) is a Black disabled strategist, nonprofit leader, TEDx speaker, writer, philanthropic practitioner, and community builder whose career began in Newark, New Jersey, and flourished in Chicago. For nearly two decades, her work has been guided by a commitment to bringing people from the margins to the center, shifting power, resources, and decision making toward communities deliberately pushed to the margins. 

Her understanding of community building began well before her professional career. As an alumna of SEEDS Access and Miss Porter’s School, Gizelle learned early that leadership is relational and that belonging must be intentionally created, practiced, and protected. Those lessons continue to shape how she convenes people, builds institutions, and approaches collective change. 

Grounded in disability justice and shaped by her lived experiences with grief, medical racism, and visible and invisible disabilities, Gizelle challenges systems that make human worth or belonging contingent upon productivity, capacity, or proximity to power. Her work advances interdependence, collective access, and shared power as essential practices of leadership and community building. Professionally, she has led national engagement strategies connecting tens of thousands of physicians and health professionals to leadership, service, and impact. 

Gizelle serves as Co-Chair of the South Side Giving Circle at Chicago Foundation for Women, an advisor to The Chicago Community Trust’s Disabilities Fund, and Co-Chair of Programs and Capacity Building for Chicago Women in Philanthropy. She previously served on the Borealis Disability Inclusion Fund’s Participatory Grantmaking Committee, is an alumna of Disability Lead, Willie’s Warriors, and an inaugural fellow of Change Collective. 

Her TEDx talk, We Are the Wells: How Connection Truly Sustains Us, anchors a growing body of work that asks: What sustains us when life changes? Through We Are the Wells, Gizelle invites people and institutions to understand connection as infrastructure and to design care, access, and belonging collectively, intentionally, and before crisis requires them.