Koya Partners | Diversified Search Group partnered with the Civic Federation to recruit its next President.

Founded in 1894, the Civic Federation is an independent, non-partisan government research organization that provides analysis and recommendations on government finance issues for the Chicago region and State of Illinois. The Federation’s membership includes business and professional leaders from a wide range of Chicago area corporations, professional service firms and institutions.

Our work resulted in the recruitment of Joe Ferguson to the role.
Ferguson served as inspector general for the City of Chicago from 2009 to 2021. He was first appointed by former Mayor Richard M. Daley and twice reappointed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Working across three mayoral administrations, Ferguson transformed the Office of Inspector General into a highly respected and effective force for accountability and transparency in government. He was a skilled public advocate and led a team of nearly 100 employees to national acclaim for the Office’s government performance audits and audit-based evaluations of an array of city agencies and programs, as well as for its investigations and innovations in government data transparency.

Prior to becoming inspector general, Ferguson spent 15 years with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois. He was a chief of the office’s Money Laundering and Forfeiture Section and a deputy in the Complex Fraud and Financial Crimes Section, where he directed cases related to terrorism financing, government programs, health care and financial institution fraud, racketeering and public corruption. He represented the federal government before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ferguson’s earlier work as a Civil Division attorney included affirmative civil fraud litigation under the False Claims Act, employment discrimination (Title VII), civil rights, and environmental law. His prior litigation work also included serving as counsel on environmental enforcement and death penalty matters brought before the United States Supreme Court.

He teaches at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and is a founding co-director and lecturer of the Loyola University of Chicago Law School’s National Security and Civil Rights program. Ferguson was recently a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. In addition, he is a founder of (re)Chicago, a strategic initiative to assess and address flaws in the city’s governance structure.

Ferguson received his B.A. from Lake Forest College, which recently named him an honorary Doctor of Laws, and his J.D. from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.