About

Strategic Urban’s mission is to bring your projects and ideas to fruition. Through project management, technical and organizational systems development, fact-based decision making, and process design and implementation we will help ensure the execution of your projects and make the best possible impact on your community or organization.

Kauser Razvi

Kauser has over 15 years of experience working in the government and non-profit sectors. Her work has focused on bringing large organizations and departments together to focus on specific projects and programs that will improve, expand, or create a new set of services for the public good. Her personal hobbies include reading fiction, travel, enjoying Sunday mornings, and fun stuff with her kids like blueberry picking, gardening, bike riding, and beach days.

Frank Nichols

Frank graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has been a Chicago resident ever since. He provides exceptional client service in the areas of project management, technical training, requirements gathering, process improvement, and user acceptance testing. His personal hobbies include running, traveling, guitar, home brewing, cooking, and teaching his old dog new tricks.

Julia Kuo

Julia is an illustrator with experience working in-house for American Greetings and as a freelancer for clients such as the New York Times, Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Simon & Schuster, and more. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is part of a design collective at Nimbus Factory. When she’s not drawing or designing you can most likely find her eating delicious snacks around Chicago and exploring the city.

Jim Russell

Since 2006, Jim has been blogging about the geography of talent at Burgh Diaspora. His academic subfields of expertise are globalization, geopolitics, and migration. Professional interests are community redevelopment and talent-based economic development. When not thinking about talent migration, Jim can be found engaging in beer tourism.

Ellen Shafer

Ellen’s expertise is in designing learning and coaching solutions that result in more rewarding people interactions and more productivity on the job. Ellen brings a fresh approach to the training and development experience. She is skilled in assessments that may help guide the coaching and training process and is a certified trainer in many nationally known training programs, such as DDI, AchieveGlobal, Inscape, MBTI, etc. She is a graduate of Coach U, a member of Coachville and the World Association of Business Coaches. She is a registered corporate coach and a certified facilitator in Experience Point’s Design Thinker.

Tariq Sachleben

A Computer Science major at Northeastern Universtiy and graduate from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, intern Tariq Sachleben looks to develop his business and research skills through intensive, practical work with Strategic Urban.  In his free time, Tariq plays classical Upright Bass and dabbles in Game Design.