Liza Mueller
Vice President
Thought Leadership
Liza is dedicated to ensuring that Echoing Green is a learning organization. As head of knowledge and thought leadership, she supports Echoing Green’s mission to advance global equity and sustainability by increasing our impact potential and influencing the fields of social innovation and philanthropy to move significant resources and shift power to proximate leaders and their communities.
Liza Mueller brings nearly two decades of experience in program evaluation, systems design and implementation, and research to her role as Vice President of Knowledge at Echoing Green. Over the last decade, she has transformed the organization’s systems architecture, guided its strategic planning, and launched its knowledge function to creatively leverage data and insights to deepen Echoing Green’s impact. During her tenure at Echoing Green, Liza has previously overseen its operations and programs teams and now regularly plays an advisory role in aligning team strategies across the organization.
Liza believes that transformational social change can happen only when deep trust, respect, and community voice are centered across the board — from sharing resources, to program design and implementation, to research and thought leadership. In 2020, Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group published Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table, which was the product of nearly nine years of patient data collection and research by Liza, her team, and Echoing Green’s programs staff. Her team also produces annual reports on trends in the social entrepreneurship field and contributes to research across the sector. Liza is an active Echoing Green representative on cross-sector alliances, including Catalyst 2030 and the World Economic Forum COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs. She is a dynamic public speaker who has presented on topics ranging from theory of change development, impact management, inequity in access to capital, and Sustainable Development Goals in social enterprise.
Before joining Echoing Green, Liza’s career focused on creatively designing and implementing systems to collect, organize, and present information to further the mission and goals of remarkable organizations, entrepreneurs, and artists. Liza holds a degree in biology from Hendrix College and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which enabled her to travel the world surveying the impacts of coastal development on sea turtle populations.
