Lisa Richter
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Email: lrichter[at]avivarcapital.com

Lisa is a Managing Partner and co-founder of Avivar Capital. Previously, Lisa co-founded and led GPS Capital Partners, a national consultancy that assisted foundations and other institutions to design and execute impact investing strategies. Lisa co-leads Avivar’s overall business activities, bringing over two decades of fund management and investing experience spanning asset classes, return expectations, geographies and issue areas, and frequently incorporating place-based or sector focus to increase equitable access to opportunity. Clients range from small to the nation’s largest independent and community foundations, banks and institutional investors, with interests ranging from place-based outcomes to theme-based strategies that apply traditional asset allocations to earn market-rate expected returns.

Lisa authored the Grantmakers In Health Guide Impact Investing, co-authored Equity Advancing Equity (a guide to community foundation impact investing) and co-authored a rural community foundation impact investing guide. She co-designed the Mission Investors Exchange Institute where she continues as a lead trainer. Through early 2006, Lisa led the National Community Investment Fund, a national Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that places equity and debt in development banking institutions and built its national network of development banks and credit unions that increase asset building credit and financial services.

Prior to that, Lisa assisted foundation, bank, government and community-based clients to create or expand development financing initiatives in urban, rural and tribal communities throughout the U.S. Lisa is a Senior Fellow with The Philanthropic Initiative, and serves or has served as a director or advisor to the Center for Community Development Investments of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (where she currently also serves as scholar-in-residence), Bank of America National Community Advisory Council, Dignity Health’s Community Economic Initiatives Subcommittee, American Journal of PreventativeMedicine, CDFI Coalition, Chicago Community Loan Fund, US Social Investment Forum, and New Markets Tax Credit Coalition. She holds a BA and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Lisa is an Adjunct Instructor co-teaching a graduate course on impact investing at USC.