Lisa Bennett
Author | Speaker | Facilitator | Advisor
Leadership for purpose-led organizations
Lisa Bennett has spent decades exploring one question: How do we rise to great challenges without being flattened by them?
Over time, that question has led her to another: What happens when the very ways we have learned to care for, protect, and improve what matters begin to wear us down?
That inquiry is at the heart of her forthcoming book, Savor the World: How to Draw Strength From What You Love and Keep Showing Up for It. The book explores a different way of meeting difficult times, one that allows us to remain deeply engaged with what needs our care while staying connected to what makes that care possible in the first place.
Lisa is also the co-author of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman, editor of Women Amplified, and a contributor to The Compassionate Instinct and numerous other books.
Her perspective has been shaped by decades spent working with and learning from people tackling consequential problems from many different vantage points: CEOs, executive directors, university presidents, scientists, writers, psychologists, neuroscientists, educators, activists, and people creating change in their own communities and organizations.
Her career has crossed journalism, education, communications, facilitation, and organizational leadership. Across those roles, she has seen the same tension again and again: people can care enormously about the work and still find themselves struggling to carry it when setbacks mount, resources tighten, and the possibility of making a difference feels less certain.
Today, Lisa helps purpose-led organizations find a bigger way to hold that work. Through talks, workshops, facilitated experiences, and advisory relationships, she helps reconnect mission, people, and resources and supports leaders and teams in seeing more clearly where to focus, staying grounded through setbacks, and recognizing where their efforts can make a difference.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Harper’s, Vox, Big Think, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Thrive Global, among many other publications.
Lisa has spoken at the National Press Club, California Academy of Sciences, Garrison Institute, Packard Foundation, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner, and has appeared on BBC, NPR, C-SPAN, ABC, and NBC-TV San Francisco.
Her clients and partners have included the American Psychological Association, Brown University, California Academy of Sciences, Conferences for Women, Cornell University, the MacArthur Award-winning FrameWorks Institute, Human Rights Campaign, Protect Our Winters, Southern Poverty Law Center, Woods Hole Research Center, and others.
Lisa holds a bachelor’s degree in literature and writing and a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University and was a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. A native New Yorker, she lives in California and is the mother of two adult sons.
Why this work
I grew up in Levittown, New York, the first mass-produced suburb in the world. The houses were famously similar, built quickly and efficiently for a growing postwar middle class.
As a teenager, I was desperate to see what lay beyond them.
I was intensely curious about the larger world, and increasingly troubled by what was happening in it. I went to Columbia University with dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent. Before long, my attention was pulled toward racism, homophobia, inequality, environmental destruction, and the many ways people were trying to change things for the better.
A question began following me: Why do some people step forward to help while others don’t?
That question shaped decades of work as a journalist, author, leader, facilitator, and advisor. I talked with scientists, psychologists, educators, activists, organizational leaders, and people quietly making a difference in their own communities.
Over time, the question changed.
I became increasingly interested in the people who had stepped forward. What allowed them to keep caring when progress stalled? What happened when setback followed setback? How could people remain deeply engaged with what they loved without becoming consumed by everything threatening it?
That question became more personal, too.
And eventually it led me to Savor the World: a way of thinking about how we stay connected to what we love while living fully inside a world that gives us so much to worry about.