Lisa Leverette

Co-Founder and Design Team Member | Transforming Power Fund (TPF)

Lisa Leverette is a Detroit-based Change Orchestrator. Her experience spans over 25 years and is concentrated upon utilizing the framework of relationship building and an equity lens to identify and eliminate barriers to success, manage and change systems to improve conditions, opportunities and odds for marginalized groups and communities.

Lisa currently manages Community Connections Grant Program, a philanthropic intermediary working in partnership with institutions, foundations and communities to re-grant funds to increase the capacity of institutions and grassroots groups to act and achieve relevant and transformational change. The program is a proven tool for resident engagement, building and strengthening responsive local and institutional leadership and achieving bottom up systems change. She manages the entity through a laser focused equity lens, ensuring positive impact for those pushed to the furthest margins of society. Ms. Leverette is also a facilitator and trainer focused on grassroots grantmaking, equity and achieving group consensus.

Miss Leverette serves on several local and national boards and development exchanges including co-founder and design team member, Transforming Power Fund (TPF), Detroit Equity Action Lab (DEAL)fellow, Grassroots Grantmakers and 1Michigan for immigrant rights, board member and chairperson of the International Committee for Self-Development of People (SDOP).

Lisa has a B.S. in Psychology from Michigan State University and M.A. in Applied Social Science from Eastern Michigan University.

Presentations from Facing Race 2018

Moving to Racial Justice Grantmaking — Outside/Inside Strategies to Shift Power

How do we ensure that the perspectives of communities of color and other other most impacted communities are shaping and driving the philanthropic change agenda, especially around racial justice?

This interactive session will engage participants to lift up both examples and messages of activists claiming power to transform philanthropy in advancing racial justice. It will share local and national level lessons from Changing the Conversation: Philanthropic Funding and Community Organizing in Detroit, PRE's Guide to Grantmaking with a Racial Justice Lens, NCRP's Power Moves, and more, with focus on trends and questions of funders moving from racial equity to racial justice and building, wielding, sharing - and importantly - yielding power, and what that truly means in grantmaking.

The outside/inside emphasis will seek to honestly examine the relationships and roles of effective organizing from the community/grantseeker side to disrupt, reform or reclaim resource flow and decision-making; advocacy, organizing and training from intermediary roles to change frames and build skills; and organizing, bridge-building or leading from within institutions to transform policies and practices. How can we play our roles most with impact and accountability?

Speakers: Lori Villarosa, Caitlin Duffy, Lisa Leverette