“Action-driven optimist, abundance thinker, simplicity-seeker, and weekend wanderer.”
“Action-driven optimist, abundance thinker, simplicity-seeker, and weekend wanderer.”
Risa Wilkerson is Executive Director of Healthy Places by Design. She provides overarching leadership and strategic vision to fulfill the organization’s mission of creating community-led change by working with local, state, and national partners to build a culture of active living and healthy eating. Risa has been connected to the organization since 2002, when she was a grantee of the Active Living by Design initiative. She joined the team in 2008 as Senior Project Officer, and provided coaching, technical assistance, and grant oversight to multidisciplinary community-based partnerships across the country, with a focus on improving health through policy, systems, and environmental change strategies. From 2014-2015, she also served as Healthy Places by Design’s Marketing and Communications Director and, subsequently, Associate Executive Director.
Risa brings wide-ranging experience in coalition building, community assessment, public health program planning and implementation, grant writing, and nonprofit management. She provides leadership to the field by serving as the Safe Routes to School National Partnership’s Board Chair, as a sector chair to the National Physical Activity Plan, and as a member of the Prescription for Activity Task Force.
Before moving to North Carolina, Risa was the Vice President of Active Communities for the Michigan Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Health and Sports, where she led project teams in a statewide effort to create active communities. Risa holds an M.A. in Communication from Michigan State University. She is also an alumna of the University of South Carolina’s Physical Activity and Public Health Course, a training program sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At home, Risa loves to spend time with her husband, Doug, go for runs, kayak North Carolina’s beautiful rivers and lakes, read, write, and hang out with her children and grandchild.
When I was hit by a car at 15, I had no idea then that I’d go on to build a career promoting walkable communities, and, ultimately, healthy places. Thankfully, I was only bruised; but over time, I’ve seen parents grieve for children who died while trying to cross dangerous roads to get to and from school. I’ve also lost a member of my own family, who was killed while walking along a road with no sidewalk. Her three children will grow up not knowing their mother.
In my early career, I connected at-risk youth to new activities, community partners, and advocacy skills. In the early 2000s, I organized a community coalition of partners who, working together, made it possible for people to walk and bike in their neighborhoods. And as a project manager during Healthy Places by Design’s early days (known then as Active Living by Design), I gained an unparalleled sense of community with social change peers around the country.
Now, with nearly 20 years’ experience working with people who have different backgrounds and identities, I have expanded my insights not just on walkability, but also on institutional racism and systemic oppression, and what it takes to truly create healthy places. Because of the people I have known, and the dozens of community partnerships and leaders who’ve taught and inspired me, I’m determined to help create a more inclusive and compassionate world—one where all people feel they belong, reach their highest potential for wellbeing, and live in healthy places.
If we are ever going to address the most pressing issues of our day, it will require collaboration and community-centered approaches that our nation hasn’t yet fully embraced. I am proud to lead an organization that is changing the paradigm.