In her role at Tamarack, Lisa works with cities, organizations, collaboratives, and funders to build meaningful community-engaged processes. Over the last ten years, her work has focused on creating authentic engagement strategies and training staff teams, teaching and writing about innovative engagement methodologies, and facilitating collaborative processes to make decisions and work together to solve our most pressing issues. She cares deeply about shifting power, extending trust, and bring creativity to community change work. Lisa advocates for simplicity in structures, frameworks, and design and loves integrating arts-based practices in community initiatives.

Lisa comes to this work from the private sector where she worked at one of Canada's leading communications firms with clients in agribusiness, healthcare, financial services and technology. Hailing from Australia, Lisa also worked on major water infrastructure projects as the liaison between municipal government, engineering and the community.

Lisa’s other titles include Artist, Wife and Mum. On the side, Lisa is one of ten owners of Seven Shores Community Café in Waterloo, ON.

• Community Engagement
• Community Innovation
• Collective Impact

Learn with Lisa

• Foundations of Community Engagement. 2020. Online Course.

• 10 - A Guide for a Community-Based COVID-19 Recovery. 2021. Guide
• Guelph's Community Plan: Embracing a Year of Listening. 2020. Case Study
• Understanding Community-Led Approaches to Community Change. 2020. Paper.
• Creating the Culture for Engagement. 2019. Paper.
• The Context Experts. 2017. Community Change Institute Series. 
• Worked with the Sewall Foundation to lead a community co-design process to reimagine a new model for philanthropy
• Worked with the City of Peterborough, Region of Waterloo, the Town of Innisfil and the City of Surrey on their Community Engagement Strategy and Guidelines and training programs for municipal community engagement.
• Developed a guide titled Engaging Your Community for the Ontario Museum Association that details a 6 step process for museums to go through when they want to have a closer relationship and be more relevant to their community.
• Forward: How Technology Improves Community Engagement. 2015. Engage!