In September 2022, Lisa Mensah joined Oregon Community Foundation as the organization’s third president and CEO.

It was a key time for OCF: At the same time as it celebrated its 50th anniversary, the foundation launched work on its next strategic plan.

Mensah was born and raised in Oregon, the daughter of an immigrant from Ghana and a former Iowa farm girl. She holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

She began her career in commercial banking at Citibank then joined the Ford Foundation, where she was responsible for the country’s largest philanthropic grant and loan portfolio of investments in rural America. In the Obama administration, she served as Under Secretary for Rural Development in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she managed a $215 billion loan portfolio. Most recently, she led the Opportunity Finance Network, a national network of community development financial institutions.

In this interview with EO Media, Mensah talks about her origins, what she’s learned during a listening tour of the state and – answering a completely unfair question – what she hopes her legacy might be at the foundation. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

EO Media: You were born in Oregon and raised in Oregon, right?

Lisa Mensah: I was born in Portland … But I was really raised in Beaverton. My dad worked for Tektronix. My folks met in Corvallis at Oregon State in the 1950s. He was an international student.

For a few years, we went back to Ghana, my father’s home. … We came back from Ghana and I was raised in Beaverton. Oregon was and has always been home.

EO Media: Your master’s degree is in international studies. What got you interested in that subject?

Mensah: The expectation in my family was that you would always leave the world a better place. And for me, that had something to do with more international cooperation. … And that took me to grad school to international studies, but I think mostly it was this sense of possibility for a better healthier, wealthier world that shared resources better. How do we change this?

EO Media: How do you think that early experience has shaped the rest of your career?

Mensah: One benefit of aging is you get to look back. … I was always more interested in core development issues, of how to move people forward in a serious way. How women hold up an economy, where and how microfinance can improve livelihoods. That’s actually why I started my career in banking. …

I ended up moving from banking to Ford Foundation, where I spent 13 years on exactly those questions, particularly rural poverty and resource allocations. How does money flow in communities who’ve lost their original extractive basis? … I was very drawn to the field of community development, finance, financial institutions. … And that took me deep into questions of asset creation among low-income populations.

When I was working for the Obama administration, I was essentially running a bank inside of the Department of Agriculture. It’s the portfolio of loans that changes rural America. And when my service with that administration ended, I moved to the Opportunity Finance Network – a national membership organization of community development financial institutions. I was asking the same general questions. This time, I arrived just in time for a pandemic. And now what does the American economy need? It needs what they call the capillary funders, not the arterial financial players, but the capillary players who can understand how to make small businesses and housing work at a very grassroots level where our large financial institutions largely don’t make their market.

And now here I am running Oregon’s largest foundation – facing the same questions about money flow, and this time with flexible, charitable dollars that communities want and need.

Bio box

Name: Lisa Mensah

Age: 62

Hometown: Beaverton

What she does for fun: Weekend trips to hang out with friends. Reading; a current favorite is “The Fraud,” the new novel by Zadie Smith. And this “lifelong soprano” loves to sing — these days, mostly in the shower and at church.

EO Media: I hadn’t before heard that notion about arterial funders and capillary funders. But the idea of capillary funding captures a lot of what OCF is trying to make happen.

Mensah: Philanthropy is another kind of capillary, I think. And I think philanthropy was always dedicated to some of the things that were never going to be (handled by the) market. … So philanthropy always knew there was a role to reach where market forces wouldn’t go. If you’re going to be at a community foundation, you have a special opportunity to work at that capillary level.

EO Media: Many folks and institutions throughout Oregon – and I’m thinking now of an organization like Wallowa Resources – are working on the issue of a shortage of workforce housing. And it’s particularly difficult in rural communities, because they don’t necessarily have access to the arterial funding. They have to figure out how to fund this through community institutions, and maybe through philanthropy.

Mensah: It is, I think, core to my sense of why those of us who have the privilege of working with special kinds of money need to be listening hard to institutions like Wallowa Resources, who get it, who understand that they’re not just a Band-Aid operation. They’re actually a tentpole; they are holding up a whole way a market must re-create. And one of the reasons I love working in rural areas is that they’re small enough and it’s obvious enough that, with few exceptions, the major financial entities aren’t rushing to Wallowa County, with 7,500 people to make their market. …. That’s simply how big systems work. …

So who’s going to do the work in 7,500-person Wallowa County when you need workforce housing? That’s why I think there is a powerful role for entities like Wallowa Resources in the development finance sector, that can bridge and pull subsidies to make markets. What’s so wonderful is once you stand up a house, the same old market forces take over. Once you get a house built, somebody will write the mortgage, perhaps a community bank – a traditional 30-year mortgage, which is a proven way to make wealth in this country. But it needs a push. And I love institutions that can push.

EO Media: So OCF has a role to play in getting that capillary funding going. But OCF has a bigger role than that, I think, in working with these organizations in rural communities, in urban communities. I’ve talked with organizations that relied on OCF for capacity-building grants, delivered at just the right moment. And that early money shows up, again and again, to be critical in building community partnerships.

Mensah: We have become a foundation that is so clearly invested in building the partnerships that are going to last for the long term. And so, I love early money. Early money is usually about trusting some budding leadership and (ensuring) that they are in place to do important work. And early money is a lot of fun. Because you see something that should grow. What’s harder, I think, is staying with it. And especially as organizations grow, and they grow beyond the first $5,000 grant or the first $10,000 or $20,000 grant. And then I find in this foundation, we understand how to be both an early innovative funder, but also to be there for the long haul to be a sustained funder and to be an aggregator to call more folks in. To say, we’ll help you when you get the next idea to build something.

EO Media: One of the things that has struck me about the foundation is that it’s relatively nimble at picking up on areas like workforce housing, or Project Turnkey (which provided money to renovate hotels statewide to be used as shelters and transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness) or supporting children’s dental health. The foundation looks for issues where it can play a role statewide, but it also needs to be responsive to issues that might be emerging in the communities that it serves.

Mensah: I would call the foundation a creative listener. Because responsiveness sounds a little passive. … When I was considering this role at Oregon Community Foundation, I asked board members to show where this foundation has taken some risks. … And the three issues you just talked about came up: children’s dental health, workforce housing, and Project Turnkey.

(With children’s dental health), the foundation had this 10-year experience of trying to take an experience that started in one region and was so emblematic of why kids were missing school, and to try to move that higher up on the priority list of the state. They didn’t win every battle. They lost some big ones. But they’ve created new infrastructure, new institutions that can hang in there. They’ve given visibility to an issue.

Similarly, with Project Turnkey, I heard about a board that had to respond over a weekend on whether or not we would become the place to channel state money in a very difficult way. … You know, it’s a complicated proposition that you’re going to take structures that were underused, vacant, that were hotels that were different kinds of facilities (and) convert them to be supportive housing. It’s a complicated proposition, and exactly what Oregon needed.

And I think workforce housing will be another one of those nimble, complex areas where it’s not obvious to everybody why people who are working, who should be middle class, can’t afford homes. And it’s because it’s not just an affordability problem. It’s a supply problem. So it’s very complicated … for a foundation to step in and say, “You know what, we have to listen to our partners and help with the subsidy dollars. That will create something that is not necessarily just for low-income people but is a driver in making the whole economy work.” I love that we’re going to listen hard to people. And we may be part of the big solution here for this state.

Certainly, it was fun to leverage the big money (at the Department of Agriculture). And it’s fun to go cut ribbons, when there are major housing, projects and major water and wastewater and broadband, those are so needed in our rural areas. And I loved it. … But this part of the game does take nimbleness, it takes creativity, takes patience, this is slower work. It’s why markets don’t reward it typically, because the upside is not market returns; the upside is 20 people are going to have housing and it will transform the downtown of Enterprise, Oregon.

EO Media: And it makes all the difference for those 20 people.

Mensah: It makes all the difference.

EO Media: Now with housing, one of the challenges that OCF faces is that, even though it’s a statewide issue, it’s different region by region. It’s different in Eastern Oregon. It’s different in the Willamette Valley. It’s different in Southern Oregon. You have a bunch of different situations on the ground, which will test the foundation’s nimbleness and its ability to recognize and to identify the partners that you want to work with in those communities.

Mensah: This is where it’s very nice to walk into the presidency of something with a 50-year history. I am not starting from scratch to think about 36 counties in Oregon. … We’ve been around, and we’ve been building those relationships, this grantmaking infrastructure, offices and programming around the state. I was on a call just yesterday with the Southern Oregon Leadership Council, one of eight volunteer leadership councils around the state, and they’re all volunteers. These are folks who wake up every day thinking about and working in these areas – and they offer us their knowledge, their skill sets, their time to work on these complicated issues.

EO Media: One of your goals in the first year was to embark on a listening tour throughout the state. Why was that important to you?

Mensah: Well, the first word in the name of the organization is “Oregon.” We are one of the rare statewide foundations. … I needed to meet a new generation of leaders. And I needed a refreshed sense of this state.

EO Media: What did you hear during the tour?

Mensah: Every time I went out, people wanted to tell me what they loved about their region. And people wanted to tell me what had been going on, what had they done, why they love their libraries, why they were communities who still had high levels of volunteerism, why they didn’t leave, particularly in rural areas, why they wanted to raise their kids there. …

When communities have a chance to tell their own stories, they often start with a point of pride. They don’t tell it like the evening news; they don’t say who’s died. They start with what they love. … We almost always started with what is working, what we love. And that really helped me to see that, oh my gosh, there’s so much more that is not visible on the surface.

I think there’s a lot to love. I mean, I’ve been in 49 states. And I’ve had the privilege of seeing people love their places, particularly rural places, all over this country. And now I’m home. And this is my state.

EO Media: So it sounds as if during your listening tour, when you got out around Oregon, those rural-urban divisions we hear so much about in the media faded away, at least a bit.

Mensah: The Oregon Community Foundation has no time for amplifying division. We have to get to the business of fixing things. … If you’re a grant seeker, you are in the solution business, you are trying to move something positive forward. If you’re a grant giver, your whole legacy is tied up with trying to move something forward. So we get to talk every day every day with grant givers and every day with grant seekers. And I think that both are convinced that this place can be better.

EO Media: How is Oregon Community Foundation different now than it was 50 years ago?

Mensah: I’m not sure I have an answer for the whole scope of change. What’s so obvious to me is if you go from a $63,000 initial investment – the original gift from a group of funders – to $3 billion in assets it’s not so much that the (original) group has changed, but who – and how many more – came thundering in. The original families, they’re still here. What matters is who joined them, who got in this water. And that is a testament to 50 years of recruiting donations in all of our regions. And so that’s been a fascinating story. And I feel like it’s a story we haven’t finished writing yet.

We made a lot of room for all kinds of different donors. Some were fierce environmentalists, some were tireless champions of the arts. And we honor that, sure. I wasn’t here when the Fred W. Fields gifts came in (to support arts and education efforts), but I love the fact that an inspiring donor who arrived just 10 or so years ago shifted our game, just in a dramatic way. And I think we need to be open to that kind of opportunity.

EO Media: Here’s an unfair question: What do you hope your legacy will be when you step down from the job?

Mensah: That’s a fun question. It’s unfair, but it is kind of fun. It will probably not have much to do with my name. I think we’ll be here. And so by 2073, I suspect that philanthropy will be a permanent partner to a capitalist system that will always leave people out; there will always be things that the market doesn’t do. And so if we’ve been able to maintain our statewide focus, which I hope we will, I think we’re going to be huge … just by market growth alone. … But the point of that is to be this responsive engine to things that need work and innovation.

I think the fun part about being here in 2023, at the 50-year mark, though, is, to me, this is a kind of rudder moment, when we said as a state, “We’re not going down. We are not going down the path of losing vitality, either due to climate or due to inattention.”

EO Media: Why apply for the OCF job in the first place?

Mensah: I don’t think this organization has sung its best aria yet. And whenever you get a chance to be part of something that is ripe for positive change, and you realize, oh, my goodness, I could be part of something that can be even a bigger change agent, that was really the appeal of this job. This is an institution that has an incredible amount of capacity to do good.