Category: Upcoming Speakers

Michael Fassnacht – President & CEO, World Business Chicago and Chief Marketing Officer for the City of Chicago. A seasoned marketing leader with more than 25 years of experience, Michael works alongside the Mayor’s office as the Chief Marketing Officer to ensure that all marketing, branding, and business development activities for the city are aligned with Mayor Lightfoot’s economic growth plan focused on inclusive growth across Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. In December 2020, Michael stepped in as interim President and CEO of World Business Chicago to ensure a smooth transition to a new leader while intensifying World Business Chicago’s efforts to attract new companies to Chicago. It became clear very quickly that Michael was the right person to lead WBC into the next chapter and he graciously accepted the full-time position in May of 2021. Michael Fassnacht has been a recurring figure in Chicago’s civic community and has led critical pro-bono work for the rebranding of the Chicago Public Library and its foundation, the city’s Amazon HQ2 pitch, the city’s Census 2020 activities and most recently “Boards of Change”, an award-winning initiative to encourage residents to register to vote. Additionally, he has been involved as a board member with: Marwen, World Business Chicago, and the Civic Consulting Alliance; while providing counsel to P33, the Joyce Foundation and the Chicago Prize by the Pritzker/Traubert Foundation.

Prior to his role as CMO, Michael served for more than 10 years as CEO at one of the city’s oldest and most successful advertising agencies, Foote Cone & Belding (FCB). He led his agency to unprecedented international creative recognition and strong above-industry topline growth over his tenure. Before then, he was a successful start-up entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and over his long career he has been recognized as a global expert in building and marketing brands.

Michael was born in Germany and made his way stateside in college where he met his wife,
Dr. Rhonda Duffaut. They currently reside in Chicago and have two teenage children, Maya and Ryan.

Since 2012, Sam Toia has served as President & CEO of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), a non-profit trade association representing the state’s largest private sector employer. The IRA owns and produces Chicago Gourmet – the annual food and wine festival held in Millennium Park that unites hundreds of restaurants, chefs and beverage experts and more than 14,000 attendees for a weekend filled with food and drink tastings, entertainment, cooking demonstrations, book signings, interactive seminars and more. The Association is a proud host of the James Beard Foundation Awards, which will be held in Chicago through 2027 and celebrates excellence in cuisine, culinary writing, and culinary education throughout the country. Prior to his election, he served as the IRA’s Chairman of the Board.
Toia is a graduate of DePaul University and a specialist in community and government relations. He has served in leadership positions in several civic and public agencies. Previously, he was a Board Member for McPier (McCormick Place Navy Pier) from 2003 to 2010. In 2011, Toia was appointed to the Chicago Zoning Board of Appeals. In 2017, Sam was appointed a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors for Choose Chicago.
As President & CEO of the IRA, Toia is responsible for managing day-to-day operations of the association, increasing its membership base, developing strategies to enhance its profitability and maintaining positive relations with public officials and state and local agencies. He is passionate about local, state, and federal issues affecting the hospitality industry.

Maurice Cousin serves as Director of Food Access and Partner Capacity Building at the Greater Chicago Food Depository (Food Depository). Specializing in solutions rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion principles, Cousin brings more than twenty years of experience in minority community engagement and small business development. Cousin maintains a recognized reputation for providing strategic solutions to urban development and community relations thorniest challenges. Cousin understands the value of diverse teams required to successfully develop and implement justice focused solutions to systemic racial inequity issues too often plaguing minority and BIPOC communities.

At the Food Depository, Cousin leads the Food Access, Partner Services, Partner Capacity Building and newly formed Food Rescue/Agency Enabled teams. These teams comprise the community and partner facing group; responsible for providing food allocations, relationship management, trainings, and capacity building resources to the Food Depository network of over 400 traditional pantry, soup kitchens and shelters across Cook County. Since, joining the Food Depository in January 2021, Cousin has become a thought leader advancing the organizations, community impact goal of Transforming the Emergency Food System both internally and externally as co-chair of the executive leadership team workshops curated by the Vocati Group focused on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) learnings and as a co-lead of the Food Depository initiative providing $10M in capacity building grants to partners operating in the black and brown communities most disproportionally affected by the pandemic.

Prior to joining the Food Depository, Cousin served as President of Polk Street Group (PSG), a Chicago based, minority owned, boutique consulting firm specializing in community development and relationship management; providing urban market consulting support services to corporate, non-profit, and governmental clients. PSG programming ensured minority and small business inclusion within civic and private sector supply chains as well as developing “Best in Class” Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and DEI initiatives for food producing and retail distributing corporate clients. In 2008, Cousin was promoted to President of PSG when its founder, Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, was tapped by the Obama Administration to serve as Ambassador for Food and Agriculture. In 2012 Cousin supported the Ambassador’s successful bid to become CEO of the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization addressing issues of food insecurity and malnutrition.

Earlier in his career, whether managing a portfolio of clients at The Target Group, a Chicago based, national leader in minority supplier diversity; as government affairs liaison for the capital construction department at the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) during the $1.5 billion, Plan for Transformation redevelopment project or on the three (3) presidential or dozens of state and local political campaigns; Cousin pursued and promoted financial investment and economic development as the most effective tools for addressing the vexing systemic racial inequity and financial disparity issues far too prevalent in black and brown communities across Chicagoland.

Maurice earned his Executive MBA from the University of Illinois in organizational leadership and change management, a Bachelors degree in Business Economics from Florida A & M University (FAMU) and a certification in Project Management from Loyola University. Maurice is also a Father of two amazing young men Michael (18) and Maurice II (13).

David Manilow is a lifelong Chicagoan who has produced sports, travel and food related television programs for ABC, HBO, ESPN, CNBC, and PBS. In 2001, he created the Emmy and James Beard Award winning restaurant review program Check, Please! in Chicago and has since spun off local versions of the show in San Francisco, Seattle, Kansas City, Miami, Washington, DC, Phoenix, Philadelphia & Vienna, Austria. David has conducted more than a thousand interviews and also has a weekly food & drink podcast with Crain’s Chicago Business with plans to expand it to an omnichannel brand in 2022 called, “The Dining Table”.

David likes to travel the world with his wife and four kids and his favorite city to eat, besides Chicago, is Tokyo.