Lisa Tobe, Executive Director
Lisa Tobe’s 20-year career has been shaped by professional experience – and a series of “aha” moments. The executive director of Wildflower Consulting, she earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of North Carolina and has worked nationally in urban and rural settings – from small nonprofit organizations to the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness Innovative Center for Health Equity.
A common denominator: developing a vision for community-based programming and pursuing it through design and implementation.
Her first “aha” moment came in her first job. Teaching GED classes in Appalachia, she recognized poor health – and its link to lack of education and access to medical services, what graduate school later called “social determinants of health.”
As a health educator and agency leader in California, she got another “aha” lesson in the urgent need for collaboration among agencies and level of government.
And as the director of Louisville’s Center for Health Equity, she worked on charting community health measures by race, income, and neighborhood for the first time. Results were stark: average life spans were sharply lower in many low-income areas. That work intensified her commitment to helping agencies, organizations and governments at all levels work more effectively on initiatives that translate to better health opportunities.
As Executive Director of Wildflower Consulting, she has focused on organizational and community capacity-building; resource development; program development and oversight; community-driven strategic planning; evidence-based public-health practice; policy advocacy; community engagement; cross-sector collaboration; facilitation; and evaluation.
Projects have included:
- Helping secure a $2.1 million Community Transformation Grant for the Washington D.C.-based Institute for Public Health Innovation to improve health outcomes in Prince George’s County, Maryland
- Leading a grant-writing team that won the National Networks of Public Health Institutes $3.3 billion to increase health-system capacity