Grace Hou has served on Governor JB Pritzker’s Cabinet as the Secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) since March 2019. During that time, the team at the IDHS has made notable achievements, include leading Illinois to attain one of the highest response rates for the 2020 Census; launching the state’s inaugural gun violence prevention office; ensuring that families and children have food on their tables and access to public health insurance; elevating people with lived experience with mental illness to share their pathways to recovery; protecting hundreds of community providers; and saving countless lives during COVID-19. Currently, IDHS is leading the effort to resettle asylum seekers being transported to Chicago and other sanctuary cities.

The mission of IDHS is to strengthen Illinois by building up lives and communities which is achieved through an integrated network of mental health, substance use prevention and recovery, rehabilitation, developmental disabilities and family and community services. IDHS operates a $12.5 billion budget with 13,000 staff, operating seven psychiatric hospitals, seven developmental centers, one treatment and detention facility for sexually violent persons 76 local offices and four schools.

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 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 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.

She is on the board of Healthy Communities Foundation; 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, co-chairs the Opioid Steering Committee, and is a commissioner of the Early Childhood Funding Commission.