This former music educator and hospitality professional is joining our team to keep the City Bureau community connected and supported.
By Caroline Olsen
Eli Ramirez (Photo: Davon Clark)
We are excited to welcome a new team member, Eli Ramirez, to City Bureau as our Operations Manager.
Eli has been connected with City Bureau since early 2020, playing a crucial role in securing our first-ever dedicated office space at the Overton Hygienic Building in Bronzeville. He helped us sign a lease right before the COVID-19 lockdowns and is excited to be joining us full-time now, finally getting the opportunity to set us up in the new space.
Eli is bringing his background as a music educator, coffee connoisseur (two-time national barista competitor at that) and hospitality consultant to our team to manage our operations, improve our internal systems and keep our staff and community connected.
Here’s more about Eli.
Tell us about your work with City Bureau up to this point and what originally drew you to the organization.
At the onset of my work, Harry (City Bureau’s cofounder and executive director of operations) had reached out because City Bureau was on the hunt for an office building. He knew at the time I had been doing consulting for some other businesses, primarily working in the hospitality industry. So I started working out a lot of office logistics, getting the building secured, signing the lease, moving in. It was funny because we made an agreement and secured this in-person office space the week before everything shut down and none of us knew what would happen. And then my role kind of expanded and I started helping with more general operations stuff. I came to City Bureau from an off road; I’m not a journalist and I’m not in the media industry. But what I did see was a group of genuinely good people who are dedicated to what they're doing, and getting to be a part of that felt huge.
You have such a wide-ranging past experience. Can you tell us a bit more about that and what you hope you can bring to the team?
I played cello and guitar growing up, and all I wanted to do in high school was be a choir teacher at a high school. So, I moved to Texas to go to college for music education. I did that for a while, I got deep into the music education world. And then while I was in college, I picked up this coffee hobby. I applied to every coffee shop in town, but none of them would give me a job because I was 18, and I had no experience. And I went OK, this sucks. I'm just going to open a coffee shop in my dorm room, and I'm going to teach people about coffee. I would pay my RA (in coffee) to not say anything because it was totally against the rules, and I eventually amassed this following. Not only other students, but people from the town would show up, and I would just be making coffee for them from my dorm room. I loved the combination of teaching people something that I was really interested in, and also just getting to be one-on-one, face-to-face with people in this intimate way through inviting them into your space. And I got hooked on this idea that connectedness is the only thing that matters. And in any way, shape or form, it can happen, and it should be celebrated.
I left school with a music theory degree and worked in coffee for six or seven years. I was able to take all that I learned in the education world and apply it to the coffee world. I was working with coffee companies thinking through how they could create educational platforms to teach partners and customers about their coffee. I ran a sales department for a roasting company. I was an espresso machine repairman for a while. I was maybe a little too obsessive around competitive barista competitions.
But it all comes back to the idea of connectedness, and that’s what I want to bring to City Bureau. Work can be another avenue to connect with people. It's important to me to build relationships that reach beyond two humans that just happen to work together, one that evolves into a legitimate bond filled with care and respect.
What are you most looking forward to in this new role as Operations Manager?
There's so many things I can learn within the operations world, but specifically getting to meet every single person in the organization was really exciting. And in a small organization like this, there's an opportunity to craft something harmonious. There’s especially opportunities to build this harmony and connectedness with the new office space. For me, the overarching principle in designing the office is mimicking what the best high-density living situations do. In cities for example, you can have a high density of emotions and thoughts and ideas and unique combinations of things. I feel like that's why parts of Chicago feel so rich when you walk around. That's kind of how I want the office space to feel, like a microclimate of openness and resources so that if people are here, they could have everything they need.
Tell me about your relationship with Chicago and what you love about it.
I'm forever trying to get to know this place. Even though I've lived here for almost four years, it seems like it's a bottomless trove of neighborhoods and ecosystems and cultural hubs. I live in Kenwood now, I lived in Bridgeport for a while, out in Pilsen for a little bit, before that, Wicker Park and Hermosa. I wasn’t born and raised here but I am a passionate transplanted South Sider. Now, I feel like I would never want to live anywhere else because I've just found the people and the rhythms that give me energy.
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