Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Lisa Seitz Gruwell is the Deputy to the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that supports Wikipedia, and President of the Wikimedia Endowment. She leads the foundation’s Advancement Department, which is tasked with growing the global community of volunteers who edit Wikipedia and creating and implementing the revenue strategy for the Wikimedia projects. 

Lisa helps lead the foundation’s work to support the global community of volunteers who edit Wikipedia through grants, campaigns, and partnerships. She oversees $20 million in grants to a network of over 200 Wikimedia affiliates, user groups, and partners who help recruit, train, and organize Wikimedia’s over 280,000 active volunteers. She has prioritized community growth in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to expand access to knowledge. Her teams also support campaigns to close the gender gap on Wikipedia by recruiting more women editors and supporting efforts to create more biographies of notable women. They build partnerships and collaborations with libraries, museums, archives, and publishers to expand content on Wikipedia, preserve culture and heritage resources for all, and give volunteer editors free access to paywalled information sources. In this role, she also oversees the foundation’s initiatives to develop skills and peer learning networks within the volunteer community. 

Lisa steers fundraising and revenue generation strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation. During her tenure at the foundation, annual revenue has grown from $30 million to over $200 million. Her teams have built a robust global reader donation program, with over 7 million people from every continent donating an average of $15 each year.  In addition to direct donations, Lisa has prioritized building new, diversified revenue streams that will sustain the Wikimedia projects for the long term. In 2016, she launched the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent fund of over $150 million, which makes grants to support the technical innovation of the Wikimedia projects.  In 2020, her team launched Wikimedia Enterprise, which provides scaled services to Wikimedia content for the largest reusers.

Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, Lisa was the COO of a family foundation and social innovation incubator in Silicon Valley and worked for then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.  Lisa grew up in Montana, where she developed a deep love of nature and enjoys finding new hiking trails everywhere she travels.