Omar Brown

Senior Vice President, Community & Impact

Omar Brown is senior vice president, community and impact for Big Ten Conference. He joined the conference in 2020 in a newly created role in which he drives diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives throughout the conference. Among those initiatives are the Big Ten Equality Coalition – which engages, empowers, and educates student-athletes, administrators, partners, and alumni – and landmark events such as the historic Big Life Series trip to Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, in July 2022.

Brown oversees additional diversity initiatives including the Big Ten Advisory Commission and the Big Ten DEI Roundtable. In June 2022, he led the formation of LGBTQ+ Working Group to further elevate and amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ community across the Big Ten Conference.

Brown is a strategic people advisor to Big Ten Conference Commissioner Kevin Warren and leads all people operations efforts for conference including talent acquisition, professional development, and performance management. He brings a people-centric approach and leverages his strengths in communications, organizational design, and change management to modernize traditional human resource practices to deliver value to the conference.

Prior to joining the conference, Brown was an organizational transformation leader in Deloitte’s Human Capital Consulting practice, specializing in helping companies navigate through the complex people and process issues associated with business transformation.

From 2012 to 2015, Brown was part of the leadership team at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), where he spent more than two years as vice president of human resources (HR). It was in that role that he was responsible for keeping Chicago buses and trains moving by transforming HR’s focus to be “the heart” of the organization with a proactive customer-centric strategy to drive cultural change and support the CTA’s core values.

Throughout his career, Brown applied his experience in benefits consulting, finance, and diversity to counsel the City of Chicago, University of Illinois System, Illinois Housing Development Authority, General Board of Pension, and Aon Hewitt.

He holds a master’s degree in public policy from Northwestern University, a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Northeastern Illinois University.

Brown is an adjunct professor at the Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business in its Baumhart Scholars program, where he lectures on managing and motivating in the workplace. He also serves on the boards of the NorthShore University HealthSystem and the McGaw YMCA of Evanston. Additionally, he is the president of the Fellowship of Afro-American Men (F.A.A.M.) basketball league, which supports middle school aged boys and girls in Evanston, Ill.

Last updated: 8/16/2023