Giving back comes naturally to Lisa Boyd ’10. She credits the Girl Scouts for instilling community values in her and Lehigh for shifting that thinking to a global perspective and ingraining it more strongly. While at Lehigh, she was a two-time winner of the Eureka! Social Venture Competition, vice president of the Global Union, and a member of the Global Citizenship program.
“Studying and traveling abroad through Lehigh, as well as my experiences with Global Union, helped me recognize the privilege I grew up with and made me committed to addressing and dismantling systemic inequities,” she says. “At this stage, I can’t imagine a career that isn’t focused on giving back to the community.”
Now, she’s channeling her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for helping others into her current role with the transportation company Lyft. As director of social impact, Boyd has built a transportation access program called LyftUp, to provide those in under-resourced communities with access to affordable, reliable transportation in times of need. Teaming up with local organizations that understand the challenges of specific communities, LyftUp provides rides to people in need: to grocery stores, to the polls during elections, to interviews or job training, and to medical appointments, for example.
Boyd has been involved with doing good since leaving Lehigh. After graduating in 2010 with a degree in international relations, her first job was focused on water and sanitation projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Returning stateside in 2012, she worked as a social impact consultant in New York City — first building online social movements at Purpose and then co-founding and leading the strategy team at DoSomething Strategic, the consulting arm of DoSomething.org. A position with Pledge 1% — which “advises companies on how to bake giving-back into their DNA” — took her to San Francisco, where she lived for four years before moving to Lake Tahoe with her family.