Lisa Marsh Ryerson

Lisa Marsh Ryerson is president of AARP Foundation, the charitable affiliate of AARP. A bold, disciplined and collaborative leader, she sets the Foundation’s strategic direction and steers its efforts to realize an audacious vision: a country free of poverty, where no older person feels vulnerable. Since she took the helm, AARP Foundation has developed pioneering initiatives, explored new avenues for collaboration, and secured unprecedented funding to support programs and services that truly change lives.

Ms. Ryerson has spearheaded innovative partnerships with other organizations to create and advance effective solutions that help vulnerable older adults increase their economic opportunity and social connectedness. These include The Root Cause Coalition, co-founded by AARP Foundation and ProMedica, which brings the full power of health care to bear in the collective fight to address the root causes of health disparities by focusing on hunger and other social determinants of health. One of the Foundation’s most recent collaborative efforts, Connect2Affect, draws together aging, volunteer and health care organizations to help end isolation and build the social connections older adults need to thrive.

During her tenure, the Foundation has launched initiatives that include Age Strong, Work for Yourself@50+, new programs to encourage saving and home maintenance, and evidence-based grantmaking. The Foundation also brought Experience Corps under its umbrella and became the largest national sponsor of the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP).

Ms. Ryerson’s expertise in higher education — beginning in the classroom and extending through 18 years of service as the president and CEO of Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. — has enabled her to build new links between AARP Foundation and community colleges to increase employment opportunities for older adults. During her first year at the Foundation, she helped procure a $3 million federal grant from the Social Innovation Fund to expand the BACK TO WORK 50+ retraining program for the long-term unemployed. Other achievements include the release of a groundbreaking report on the state of housing for America’s older adults, a significant survey of the effects of loneliness and social isolation, and implementing an “innovation pipeline” to generate, test and analyze new ideas to help low-income seniors.

Her many accomplishments at Wells College included increasing enrollment by 45 percent — thus revitalizing the economy of the surrounding community — and launching an endowed Center for Business and Entrepreneurship. She also has served on the boards of numerous higher education and nonprofit organizations, including the Council of Independent Colleges, Southern New Hampshire University, Shriver Center on Poverty Law, the Congressional Hunger Center, and L.A. Kitchen, of which AARP Foundation is a founding partner.

Ms. Ryerson holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wells College and a Master of Science from the State University of New York College at Cortland. Lauded for her leadership, she has received numerous awards and honors. Ms. Ryerson has an honorary degree from Southern New Hampshire University, given to her in 2015; and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the State University of New York at Albany for having “met and exceeded each of John Quincy Adams’ standards for leadership”; and an honorary degree of Doctor of Social Services from Dickinson College in 2017.