Anne-Marie St. Germaine devoted her career to providing strategic messaging and communications for dozens of clients and institutions, including politicians such as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and the late Cook County Board President John Stroger.
St. Germaine also contributed to the region’s vitality by serving on a host of civic boards.
“Anne-Marie St. Germaine was one of those rare people whose presence made our civic life smarter, kinder and more humane,” Preckwinkle said in a statement. “She brought intelligence, strategic insight and deep generosity to every institution she touched, and Chicago and Cook County are better because of her work. Whether in government, the nonprofit or private sector, she was a trusted counselor and a principled leader whose judgment was sought because it was grounded in both wisdom and integrity.”
St. Germaine, 66, died of breast cancer April 12 at her Rogers Park home, in her sunroom overlooking the garden that she had created, said her niece, Alice St. Germain-Gray. She previously lived in West Town.
Born in Chicago in 1960, St. Germaine grew up in Arlington Heights and graduated from the now-closed Arlington Heights High School. St. Germaine got a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she wrote for — and for one year was the arts editor of — the school newspaper, the Daily Cardinal. She also was active in filmmaking while in college.
St. Germaine worked as a senior consultant for Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — in Chicago from 1986 until 1990, when she joined public affairs and public relations firm Jasculca/Terman & Associates, which promoted her to be senior vice president in 1999.
While at Jasculca/Terman, clients included Marshall Field & Co. and the transition team for White, who had been elected Illinois’ secretary of state in 1998.
“To say she made amazing contributions would sell her short,” Jasculca/Terman said in a statement posted online, calling her a leader “at a formative time in JT’s history.”
“Anne-Marie helped shape the foundation of who we are today. She meant so much to all of us, and we wouldn’t be the firm we are without her,” the statement said.
At home, St. Germaine was a master gardener, and she channeled that love of plants in her professional world in 2002, when she left Jasculca/Terman to sign on as vice president of external affairs at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glenview.
There, she helped secure $100 million in public investment that helped benefit the botanical garden and other regional institutions such as Brookfield Zoo Chicago and the Cook County Forest Preserve District. She also was a member of the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance.
After leaving the botanical garden in 2006, St. Germaine headed her own public affairs and policy practice. In that role, she served as a spokeswoman for the reelection campaign of Cook County Board President John Stroger.
In 2007, St. Germaine joined Chicago-based Resolute Consulting, a communications and public affairs firm, as chief creative officer. In 2011, she was promoted to managing director overseeing the public-private partnership and infrastructure practice, and in 2014, she remained with Resolute while taking on a temporary role as interim vice president of marketing and communications at Columbia College, a Resolute client.
At the end of 2017, St. Germaine left Resolute to form her own public affairs and strategic communications firm, Terrace Strategies LLC. Clients included the Steppenwolf Theatre and tortilla maker El Milagro.
St. Germaine also advised Preckwinkle, though not in an official capacity.
“She was also a person of warmth, creativity and joy who built community wherever she went,” Preckwinkle said in her statement. “She understood that leadership was not only about titles or achievements, but about how we care for one another and how we make people feel seen, welcomed and valued.”
St. Germaine had served on numerous groups’ boards of directors. She came to know Grace Hou, now Illinois’ deputy governor for health and human services, while St. Germaine was serving on the board of the private grant-making foundation Let’s Fund Chicago. Hou at that time was the foundation’s president.
“I remember her smile and her warmth and her savvy communications smarts,” Hou said. “She was a strategic communications leader, and she was really generous with her talent and her innovation and applying it to our foundation and how we could elicit and make the change we were seeking, using her know-how. She was a generous person, and she cared about Let’s Fund Chicago. She wanted it to succeed and she wanted its grantees to succeed as well.”
St. Germaine also served on the board of Woods Fund Chicago. Michelle Morales, the board’s president, praised St. Germaine’s work and commiserated over the fact that both had battled breast cancer.
“She was an incredibly thoughtful board member and was someone who put in the work, which is rare for board members,” Morales said. “She was so full of faith — and she was someone who really believed in social justice and believed in a better world and did her best to help bring that about.”
St. Germaine never retired. Outside of work, she enjoyed sharing her home with her canine and feline friends, and she was a major supporter of animal rescue and shelter organizations PAWS and One Tail at a Time.
A painter, St. Germaine got a certificate in painting from the School of the Art Institute in 2023. St. Germaine had a range of other interests as well, her niece said.
“I know this is a cliche, but she was such a Renaissance woman. She loved to garden, she loved to paint both watercolors and oil painting, and she loved to travel,” her niece said. “And one of her favorite things to do was to have people over for a simple get-together with wine, crackers, olives and cheese — people she had met through church or through the neighborhood. She also spent a lot of time reading; she was a voracious reader and she was constantly curious about the world and keeping up with it.”
Megan Vidis, a friend, called St. Germaine’s home “kind of an unofficial salon for friends, colleagues and neighbors.”
“Her extraordinary, sprawling backyard garden was a refuge in the city,” Vidis said. “People gathered under string lights on her porch, sharing gourmet meals she just whipped up. She was the person you called for everything from how to rescue an aphid-infected plant to how much to charge a client. And she always made time.”
A marriage to Scott McIntosh ended in divorce. In addition to her niece, St. Germaine is survived by a sister, Mary Piskorski; a brother, John St. Germain II; and a nephew, John St. Germain III.
A visitation will take place at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Gertrude Catholic Church, 1420 W. Granville Ave., Chicago. A funeral Mass will follow at 11 a.m.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance writer.
