Karae Lisle (MBA 1998) has watched firsthand the struggles of the homeless, with a close family member living on the streets and in shelters in Florida, on and off, for years. His personal struggles limited the family’s ability to help, so Lisle, based in Palo Alto, California, placed her hopes in the nonprofits and social services organizations whose staffs had the skills to help, and plotted a different way to give back. “My thinking was, if I were to help people here in California,” she recalls, “that would pay it forward for someone helping my family member in Florida.”

The idea was to take Lisle’s business know-how—she had led revenue generation and growth opportunities in the private sector at companies like Oracle, Zefer, and Wellbourne International—and apply it to nonprofits rooted in the social services. The chance to do that came when a search firm contacted her about a position at San Mateo–based Shelter Network, which needed her skills to research and implement its merger with another homelessness service provider, InnVision, in Santa Clara. InnVision’s business model was to charge homeless people for shelter, which meant it often had empty beds. Shelter Network’s services, on the other hand, were delivered at no cost to clients; consequently, the organization was always at capacity and often had to turn people away. “We needed capacity (beds) and had strong financials, InnVision had empty beds, and there was a growing number of homeless people who needed our help,” she says.

A success to be sure, but the nonprofit world, Lisle quickly learned, was more complicated than the business world: “In the private sector, a customer pays and receives something, whether it be a product or a service. In the nonprofit world, there is a more complex model, in that the person who is paying, the philanthropist, is typically not the person receiving the service.” This fundamental difference, she notes, changes the function-benefit sales framework.

Lisle found that she thrived at speaking with philanthropists. “Like me, there’s usually an emotional story about how the donor has been touched—a family member receiving specific services from nonprofits, for example—and they have a sense of empathy and compassion,” she says. “I am able to get to that quickly, tap their charitable senses, and then ask for funding.” That means more money not only for the people her organizations serve, but also for the people who have chosen to work for such organizations. “I laugh all the time that nonprofits work with duct tape and rubber bands,” says Lisle. “The goal is not to do that. It’s to get staff ample pay and new, not used, computers as well as to cover work expenses. It’s about the things that would make their work better and easier, which are resources that private-sector employees take for granted.”

In January 2019, Lisle became CEO of Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit that offers evaluation, counseling, training, and education for the blind and those who have limited sight. She jumped in quickly and learned the challenges that the Vista Center faces, which includes addressing a generation of baby boomers who are gradually losing their sight and in need of help. “I've moved from serving people with socioeconomic trauma or challenge, to people with physical challenge,” she says. “The thing that’s the same is that the client—the person receiving the services—wants to contribute to the world, raise their kids, live with without fear, and be part of a community. Independence, respect, all those things are the same bottom-line motivators of any person in trauma.” Nonprofit organizations help people regain their self-confidence and return to the community.

Lisle immediately identified technology as an area for growth. “Technology companies are acknowledging that they can play a major role in assisting the underserved, the underrepresented, and the disabled,” she says. “They understand that their work can help create independence, which enables dignity and self-respect.”

Vista Center recently piloted a conference, VistaTEC, to gauge industry interest in driving this kind of work. Tech companies not only engaged with the conference, Lisle says, but also financially supported it and provided speakers. Lisle witnessed the connections that began to form as a result. “The Google staffer knows of the Netflix staffer who is working on accessibility, but they might not have ever met,” she observes. “They were meeting at our conference and sitting in the green room, talking. There is a need for these folks to come together. As a nonprofit, we can pull them together with objectivity.”

Progress, says Lisle, doesn’t just mean offering cutting-edge technologies; it also entails incorporating them into existing services. “We’re working to introduce these technologies to clients in their 60s and 70s. These are people who don’t go to bed with their phones beside them.” Such technology, she says, includes screen readers for smart phones, for example, or the ability to use the Uber app with voice commands.

And thank goodness, she says, that tech companies and organizations are exploring the ways they can be more inclusive. “I think we have to start with the premise that people with a physical challenge can do anything that a nondisabled person can do, anything that a person with two hands or full vision can do. It may take longer, and you may have to use different tools, but we’re at a point in the world where we all believe that that’s possible.”

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