Lisa Tepper Bates, President and CEO, brings over 25 years of experience working in diplomacy and nonprofit leadership, most recently named by Governor Ned Lamont as Connecticut’s Senior Coordinator for Housing and Transit Oriented Development.

During the COVID-19 public health emergency, Ms. Bates took on a new role, as the Chair of the Recovery and Immediate Needs Subgroup of the state’s emergency management team. In that role, she worked with senior leadership from state and federal agencies alongside other leaders on a wide range of emergency response efforts as well as on the development of a statewide framework to engage multi-sector partners in planning for recovery from the impacts of COVID.

Ms. Bates served as a U.S. diplomat from 1992 to 2006. She worked overseas and in Washington, including as a Special Assistant for Europe to the Undersecretary of State and as Director for Southeastern Europe at the White House National Security Council. Her tours of duty included Poland, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia, where she worked for several years on implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement the ended the war in Bosnia.

She transitioned from diplomacy to non-profit management, serving as Executive Director of Mystic Area Shelter & Hospitality (MASH), and then as Executive Director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH). At CCEH, she led efforts to transform the homelessness response system of Connecticut and was a core member of the leadership team that worked together to reduce annual homelessness across Connecticut by 40% in just six years.

Ms. Bates holds a BA from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and an MBA from the Yale School of Management, where she focused on non-profit management. She is a Board member of the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, the Stonington Board of Police Commissioners, and has served on a number of nonprofit and community boards and committees.