Michael Kruglik - President

Mike Kruglik is the first Executive Director of Building One America.

Mr. Kruglik is a graduate of Princeton University (1964), was adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities in the early 1970’s. He has been developing grass-roots citizens’ power organizations since 1973 with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Gamaliel Foundation and Building One America. 

From 1973-1976, he was lead organizer on the Southside of Chicago for the Citizen Action Program, where he helped build a middle-class, multi-racial organization in Chicago, and lead the successful fight against Mayor Daley’s Cross-town Expressway, preserving neighborhoods on the South and Southwest and the North and Northwest sides of the city. In 1979, Mr. Kruglik was Executive Director of the Citizens Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, TX. where he led a campaign that  established a network of community health centers on the South and West sides of San Antonio.

From 1984 to 1998, he was co-director of the Calumet Community Religious Conference, the community organization that recruited and hired Barack Obama as a community organizer. Mr. Kruglik’s role as Barack Obama’s mentor has been chronicled in a number of works of history and periodicals. From 1986-1998, he developed/directed the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC) in South Cook County, Illinois. SSAC is a large congregation-based citizen organization, which created a community development arm, New Cities CDC, which  produced over 2.000 housing units, and spawned two national housing programs. From 2001 to 2004, he was Executive Director of Metropolitan Congregations United (MCU) in St. Louis.

In 1986 Mr. Kruglik, was co-founder of the Gamaliel Foundation, and from 1999-2009 served as its Director of Metropolitan Equity.