Chicago Firemen's Annuity & Benefit Fund

The eight-member Retirement Board has legal authority over investment policy and manager selection. Four trustees are ex-officio city officials — the City Treasurer, City Clerk, City Comptroller, and Deputy Fire Commissioner — and four are participants: three active firefighters and one annuitant. Day-to-day management is overseen by Executive Director Kelly Weller and senior staff.

The fund commits to institutional real estate funds rather than direct property ownership. Holdings include the IDR Core Property Index Fund, Principal Asset Management U.S. Core Property, J.P. Morgan Asset Management real estate, Apollo Global Real Estate Management, and CBRE Investment Management. These span commercial, mixed-use, and residential assets across the United States with some global exposure.

Venture exposure comes through multi-manager and fund-of-funds structures; no evidence of direct company investments appears in public records. The fund's venture-related tags include early-stage, growth, and co-investment multi-manager strategies, suggesting it accesses venture through intermediaries rather than building an in-house direct program.

The EMWQ Fund is a separate charitable vehicle managed alongside the pension fund that provides financial assistance to widows and children of deceased Chicago firefighters. It receives direct donations — the Mulhern Trust contributed $148,689.53 in 2025 — rather than being funded through pension assets. The Retirement Board approves grant amounts for EMWQ beneficiaries through its regular meeting process.

All regular monthly retirement board meetings are open to the public and typically held at 8:30 a.m. on the third Wednesday of the month at the fund office. Meeting schedules are posted on the fund's website, making this one of the few U.S. public pension plans where an external allocator can observe board-level investment deliberations directly.

The fund holds commitments to the IFM Global Infrastructure Fund and the Ullico Infrastructure Fund, both of which target core infrastructure assets globally. These sit alongside the fund's heavy real estate allocation and serve as an additional inflation-responsive sleeve for a liability stream tied to firefighter benefit obligations.

The City of Chicago is the sponsoring government entity and appoints four ex-officio trustees, while the Chicago Fire Department is the sole member base. This creates tight governance alignment — the same municipality that employs active firefighters also oversees the pension fund that will pay their retirement and survivor benefits, with open-board rules that make that alignment publicly observable.