Lisa Wolverton

President at Wolverton Foundation, Chair at The Philanthropy Workshop

The majority of my work in the past ten years has focused on the non-profit sector, both as an active investor in social change, the President of our family foundation and a part-time consultant to business and foundations alike who want to achieve great impact with their social investments and finally, as a Board Member.

Our family owns and operates the Pacific Investment Corporation, a family-owned real estate holdings and investment company. But philanthropy has also been an integral part of my family’s values and thus an integral part of our family operations is our family foundation. The Wolverton Foundation is a small Vancouver-based, private family foundation dedicated to elevating exposure to the arts and facilitating artistic programs for those children who would otherwise be excluded from these opportunities. We facilitate our granting with our longtime grantee partner, The Sarah McLachlan School of Music, by providing a permanent home for the school in East Vancouver. I am the current President of this family foundation.

I am also the founder of LMW consulting; a small, part-time advisory consultancy that assists both foundations, social enterprise and businesses alike in strategy and organizational development enhancing performance to better fulfill their missions and improve service delivery.

Since 2019, I have chaired the Board of Directors of The Philanthropy Workshop, a donor education network of 450 members in 22 countries, founded in 1995 by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Philanthropy Workshop’s mission is to drive social impact by mobilizing a global network of strategic investors bound together by their commitment to excellence, collective action and entrepreneurial approaches to the world’s most urgent issues.

I am an active philanthropist and advocate of women and children. In 2009, I founded the Canadian nonprofit, GenerationChild, an organization that provided small grants to community-based organisations working with vulnerable children in the Middle East. This foundation ran for nine years and provided over $500,000 of small grants up to $20,000 to grassroots organisations.

As an investor that believes in the importance of critical conversations that elevate women and girls, I also chaired the international conference, The Next Billion: Women and the Economy of the Future, that took place in Vancouver in May, 2015. This global gathering brought together senior-level corporate leaders and institutions – the IFC/ World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the UN foundation and the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, to discuss practical ways in which women as consumers and employees, entrepreneurs and executives are critical to the continuing success of companies in today’s competitive, international economy.

I served on the Board of Directors of UNICEF Canada for six years. I am a former member of the President’s Council of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and resolving deadly conflict. I was also a mentor for the Loran Scholarship Foundation of Canada and I sit on the Council of Advocates for the Freedom Fund, a UK trust that combats modern slavery. I currently reside in West Vancouver and I have three beautiful children.