LISA GILLIAM

SECRETARY | Cohort XVII, Orcas Island

Lisa has had a long career in international relief and development work, working primarily with refugees and war-affected communities in the Middle East. She has worked at the grass-roots level, for example supporting displaced people in war-time Bosnia and doing refugee protection and human rights reporting in Palestine, as well as in large multilateral organizations, managing health and education programs in Syria or developing organizational policies in Amman and Jerusalem.  Her most recent positions have been managing USAID monitoring and evaluation projects in Tunisia and India. Her areas of focus over the years have been refugee protection and international human rights law, gender and disability policies and programming, and monitoring and evaluation. 

Lisa has considerable board experience, having served as Secretary of the Management Committee of UNRWA, an organization with 30 thousand staff in five fields of operation, and as a board member of the American Cooperative School of Tunis. 

Lisa's parents retired to Orcas in the 1990s, beginning her relationship to the San Juan Islands, and she moved full-time to Eastsound in 2025 after losing her job  in the infamous dissolution of USAID.  She is now managing her teenage twins and her elderly parents.