Help us equip leaders to better prepare children and youth for college and careers. Donate Today!

Lisa J. Nutter (Vice Chair)

Lisa J. Nutter (Vice Chair)

Sidecar Social Finance

Lisa Nutter is a principal at Sidecar Social Finance, a social impact agency that provides impact investing advisory and capital services to individuals, institutions, and social enterprises. Her diverse professional background includes work in the fields of education, workforce development, community organizing, human services, community development, and arts and culture. She is trained as an urban planner and her decades of experience nationally as a practitioner, researcher, impact evaluator, and strategist have significantly shaped her work and belief in multidimensional approaches to community building and economic well-being. In addition, she has worked throughout her career on efforts that strengthen nonprofit organizations focused on social change—initiatives designed to improve planning, organizational learning, and reflection, as well as research and data utilization in order to deepen impact and effect systems change. These interests and experiences are reflected in her focus on social impact and financing effective social change efforts in ways that bring them successfully to scale.

From 2005 to 2017, Lisa served as president of Philadelphia Academies, Inc., a nonprofit youth development organization that partners with Philadelphia’s public high schools to implement a high school transformation approach called the career academy model. It is an evidence-based model that has been proven to improve long-term economic outcomes for youth and has been replicated nationally across 2,500 communities and 7,000 high schools. During her leadership, Nutter led an enterprise focused on significantly expanding the number of young people supported by the model in Philadelphia.

She has a B.S. in Psychology from the Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.  In 2005, she completed a year-long fellowship in the Emerging Leaders Programme which is administered by the Centre for Leadership and Public Values at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Duke University.

Nutter is actively engaged locally and nationally in issues related to social change and youth development and presently serves on the Governor of Pennsylvania’s Advisory Commission for Education and Workforce, and the board of directors for Big Picture Philadelphia and the Institute for Educational Leadership.