The Chicago Tribune’s lead City Hall reporter Gregory Pratt solicited and received at least $1,790 in donations in a GoFundMe.com fundraiser benefiting his family from sources he covers– including elected officials, political consultants and lobbyists.
The donors included Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who gave him $150, along with Evelyn Chinea-García, the wife of recent mayoral candidate, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia ($500) and former Illinois Deputy Governor and State Attorney General candidate Jesse Ruiz ($100).
Three members of the Chicago City Council Pratt covers – Ald. Gil Villegas (36th), Ald. Samantha Nugent (39th) and Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th)– also contributed to Pratt, along with Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner and lobbyist Michael Alvarez ($250) and Chicago political operatives Rebecca Carroll, Eli Stone, Carolyn Grisko and Joanna Klonsky, who recently worked for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Alvarez represents metal shredder General Iron and real estate developer Sterling Bay, which is developing the Lincoln Yards project in Lincoln Park, on which Pratt has reported.
Anonymous donors contributed $2,400 to Pratt’s fundraiser, which collected $10,316 in total.
On Nov. 3, 2021, Pratt posted a GoFundMe.com link on Twitter asking for followers to contribute money to the wife of his late father, who he said had died of cancer in Tennessee, where he lived, over the weekend.
Two weeks later, he wrote a commentary piece for the Chicago Tribune that included a link to the GoFundMe. On his father, Pratt wrote he “hadn’t seen him since I was 5 and didn’t know he was sick.”
“Dad grew up in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood but left for rural Tennessee when I was little — running away, he said, from Italians he owed money and a drug problem he couldn’t escape,” Pratt wrote.
“A trailblazer”
After Foxx announced Tuesday she wouldn’t run for re-election in 2024, she refused to take questions from reporters.
However, the state’s attorney granted Pratt an “in-depth exclusive interview.”
On Wednesday, Pratt promoted his exclusive in series of tweets, opining that she was “a trailblazer in (the) national movement to elect reform prosecutors who emphasize need to change the criminal justice system and address its wrongs from within.”
“She ushered in a new era of criminal justice where candidates talk about being smarter on crime, not just tougher,” he wrote.
Pratt, 33, was named City Hall reporter for the Tribune in May 2018.
According to the Illinois State Board of Elections, Pratt has voted in four Democratic primary elections, including 2020 and 2022, and zero Republican ones.
Pratt is registered to vote at an apartment on the 2700 block of W. 23rd Street in the Marshall Square neighborhood.
Pratt, who is half white and half Mexican, graduated from University of Illinois Chicago in 2010.
According to his Linkedin page, he worked for the “Better Government Association” and as a reporter at alternative newspapers in Phoenix and Minneapolis before returning to Chicago in 2012 to join Tribune Company.
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Who donated to Tribune Reporter Gregory Pratt’s family GoFundMe?
