Leaders Rising – Lisa Savage-Phillips
Welcome to Leaders Rising, where we explore the development journey of leaders who’ve risen from the ashes of adversity, examining the leadership gifts born from their experiences, the challenges that have held them back, and the moves they’ve made to transcend hardship and openly face the ragged edges that still remain.
Having spent the early years of her life in her family’s predominantly black community in West Philadelphia, Lisa Savage-Phillips’ life turned upside down during her third-grade year when the Philadelphia public school system—along with many other communities in the United States—began programs designed to force desegregation. “In the city of Philadelphia,” Lisa recalls, “they came up with an idea—to bus the smart black kids out of the black school into a white neighborhood. I was one that was selected to be bussed to a predominantly white school.”
During the first year of the program, the school system provided busses, but after that, students as young as eight and nine years old were forced to navigate public transportation as they made the trek to new communities on their own. For young Lisa, the daily trip to the far suburbs was terrifying. “It was very, very scary,” she remembers, “because I had to travel quite a distance to get to school. It was probably about 30 minutes, and we had to take two buses and then walk.”
Whereas early childhood had been defined by the feelings of kinship and belonging that she had felt within her community, Lisa’s experience with bussing was the beginning of a series of ongoing confrontations with deep-seated racism and prejudice that would, in many ways, define her adolescent life. “We were being bussed into a neighborhood that was predominantly white,” she remembers. “I would look out of the school bus window and see my friend’s parents protesting—white parents banging on our windows with baseball bats and holding signs saying, ‘We don’t want those kids here’ … It was very racist. They did not want integration.”
The resistance Lisa encountered from parents and children alike curdled, at times, into violence. “The walking was traumatic,” she remembers, “because we were attacked with bats and sticks and kids throwing stones at us.” And when her family moved to a white suburb in Delaware just a few years later, Lisa was forced to relive the experience of being an outsider all over again. This time, however, the racism she experienced felt even more confusing—and often more hurtful—than the violence she remembers from the Philadelphia suburbs. “I had to go through that process again—trying to figure out where to fit in and how to meet friends,” Lisa recalls. “I ended up sitting next to kids in the classroom who I became really good friends with, but I couldn’t go to their home after school because their parents didn’t like black people.”
The racial prejudice that she experienced was ubiquitous. Lisa remembers one of her friends who would tell her, “My mother doesn’t like black people,” and the innocence with which she would casually drop these racist remarks. “It was like she didn’t understand how hurtful that was. It was almost like saying, I don’t like green beans. That’s how normalized it was to them.” The nonchalance with which Lisa felt the world around her rejecting her would ultimately have extremely detrimental effects on her self-esteem and self-confidence. “I felt so bad about my black skin, so bad,” she remembers. “So bad about the texture of my hair. I remember wishing that I had long straight hair—my friend had long, straight, red hair.”
Having people literally say, ‘I don’t like black people, but I like you because you’re not like them,’ set the pattern of me wanting to be liked — of fawning and wanting to suppress parts of who I am naturally.
As Lisa sought to fit in with a peer group, she began to realize that she felt alienated not just from the white students at her school but, at times, from the black community as well. “I remember my brother coming home one day and saying, ‘You don’t dress like the other black girls.’ And I didn’t understand what he was talking about and I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He pointed out, ‘You don’t see the other black girls wearing shoes like that.’ I was wearing Birkenstock clogs at the time.”
Lisa recognizes now that her attempts to fit in with the cohort of middle-class, white students who surrounded her at times created a chasm between her and other black people. This divide was rooted as much in socioeconomic status as it was in race. “When you’re a middle-class black person, you’re treated differently than you are if you’re not a middle-class black person… Race is always an issue, but it becomes less of an issue because you’re middle-class. You look and sound like the American dream.”
But no matter how alienated Lisa might have become from her blackness at the time, she knew that she could not assimilate into whiteness. She continued to encounter casual racism again and again during her adolescence, and came to expect that prejudice could come from essentially anyone she encountered. “Having people literally say, ‘I don’t like black people, but I like you because you’re not like them,’ that’s an awful, awful message to receive,” Lisa laments. Comments like these left her feeling like she had to try to fit in. “This set the pattern of me wanting to be liked—” she reflects, “of fawning and wanting to suppress parts of who I am naturally.” To protect herself, Lisa began to subconsciously shift her self-presentation to brace herself against the pain. “When you’re expecting pain in your interaction with people, it holds you back—it makes you suppress parts of yourself. You don’t want to sound black. You don’t want to act black because of the subconscious fear of being rejected all over again.”
Despite having to grapple with the painful messages she received about her racial identity, as Lisa entered young adulthood she also encountered mentors and teachers who challenged her to believe fiercely in herself. Often drawn to her open-mindedness and progressive thinking, they pushed Lisa to pursue her personal growth through education. “I had wonderful professors,” she recalls, “who believed in me and said, ‘You need to get your master’s degree. Do not stop. Keep going, keep going. And I did.” After completing her graduate degree Lisa landed an early career job as a manager at an AIDS organization. “It was one of the first AIDS organizations in the country,” she recalls. “And at the time—this was in the late 80s, early 90s—HIV was primarily affecting gay men.”
As she worked to support a community of people who were ostracized by identity and by illness, Lisa began to recognize some of the gifts that she had gained through her adolescent experiences a victim of discrimination. “What that experience taught me,” Lisa reflects, “is that when you’re sitting next to someone who’s different, it is really hard to hate an individual. You can hate a random group of kids on a bus, but when you’re sitting and you’re interacting, and you’re having lunch, and you’re playing on the recess ground—it’s really hard to not like that person based on the color of their skin.”
In the years since, Lisa has built a career as a child and adolescent therapist. She also founded The Center for Child Development, which is now the largest black-owned practice in the United States. Lisa sees both her work and her leadership as having been guided by her eagerness for connection and her ability to relate to others. “You can’t be a good leader without having the ability to have empathy for people—” Lisa acknowledges, “without having the ability to really connect with others and treat them like they’re part of your family.” And part of empathy, for Lisa, centers on her understanding of what it means to treat others with fairness. “It’s about living in a way that doesn’t contribute to others’ pain,” Lisa believes, “about acknowledging mistakes, and knowing how to go back and repair anything that I may have done or said that was maybe not right, or hurtful.”
On her path toward leadership, values like these have helped Lisa to create an accepting space in her practice—one through which she can truly celebrate difference after having experienced what it felt like to be not celebrated in her school community as a child. “I started out working in the AIDS field with a lot of marginalized folks,” she reflects, “and I carried that into my practice, where we focused on children and adolescents—another marginalized population of people.”
As a leader, it’s important to extend generosity to other people. When I started out in my practice many years ago, I said that I would never not pay people a livable wage.
Lisa’s work with children stemmed from her desire to serve the segment of her community who was located primarily in inner city Wilmington—a population she knew would likely struggle to access the Delaware suburbs where her office was located. “I started thinking, ‘How am I going to reach these folks?” she remembers. Lisa’s solution was to meet the clients she wanted to reach exactly where they were located. “That’s how we center their needs,” she explains. “We deploy therapists to various schools, and they provide services on the spot. We take away the expectation of being traditional therapists who are sitting in an office where clients come to us. We literally meet clients where they are.”
The choice to physically and emotionally center her practice around her clients through school- and community-based outreach programs is precisely what allowed her practice to expand to its current size. And as her business has grown, Lisa has been able to take pride in running a practice that supports not just its clients, but it’s employees as well. “There are fifty-six therapists that work in my practice, which is huge,” she explains. “It’s a multi-million dollar practice… and I feel really good that fifty-six people in the state of Delaware have a good job, that they feel like they’re doing something meaningful, and they’re being compensated well for it.” As an employer, Lisa sees her leadership as defined by generosity, loyalty, and the same fairness she tries to bring to all interactions in her life. “As a leader, it’s important to extend generosity to other people,” Lisa believes. “When I started out in my practice many years ago, I said that I would never not pay people a livable wage.”
In addition to establishing and leading her practice, during the past five years Lisa also founded Clinicians of Color, an organization designed to elevate and amplify the voices of black therapists throughout the country. Through Clinicians of Color, Lisa focuses on creating and enhancing access to professional resources. “We provide members with technical support, consultation on how to set up private practices, and we created an online directory for BIPOC folks to find BIPOC professionals, and that directory has taken off.”
And yet—despite the success she has found through her professional practice—Lisa’s leadership journey was not without its challenges, and one of Lisa’s biggest personal hurdles lay in celebrating her own unique voice. In order to find her strength as a leader, Lisa needed to face the shyness, the self-doubt, and the internalized racism that had made her feel invisible as a child. “I recognized that my desire to be liked was really oppressive—because I couldn’t show parts of myself that maybe other people didn’t want to hear about,” Lisa now understands. She remembers wondering to herself, “If I’m not being authentically who I am, who are people really liking? Is it just a character that shows up and wants to be liked? Or are people really liking me for all of who I am?”
Once Lisa began to bring awareness to the ways in which she was making her own voice smaller and quieter, she began questioning the mindsets that she had been relying for years on to feel safe. “I used to be kind of shy when having to speak up,” Lisa reflects. “Those early life experiences, unfortunately, they are sometimes imprinted on you until you’re conscious of them and you can say, ‘No, I’m going to challenge that negative self-talk and then challenge any self-limiting thoughts that I have around who I am and how I show up in this world as a black middle-aged woman.’” To overcome her need to be liked by others, Lisa needed to step courageously into her authenticity, challenging herself to be heard loudly and boldly as an individual.
Being a leader means modeling behavior that you want to see in other people.
And as it became less important for Lisa to be liked by others, she began to deeply connect with her need to not just advocate for herself, but to advocate for others as well. She now confidently uses her voice as a leader in her field to speak out against racism, working to challenge the status quo and catalyze change regardless of what others may think. “You never really know how much you risk when you speak out… We may lose some people, some individuals who say that our agency is too black, or that we speak up too much about racism. But I decided a long time ago that I didn’t care anymore, that it was more important to me as an advocate—as a person who speaks up on behalf of marginalized communities—to risk speaking up in a state where it could backfire.”
Where Lisa once felt paralyzed by others’ perceptions of her, she now sees her willingness to risk others’ opinions as a defining trait of successful leadership. “Being a leader means modeling behavior that you want to see in other people,” says Lisa. “It means that sometimes you have to make difficult decisions—it also means that not everyone’s going to like or agree with the decisions that you make.” As she continues her trajectory of building her practice around marginalized communities, Lisa is now looking ahead in her practice by making efforts to create a safe space for trans children.
Having developed the confidence she needed to advocate for the disenfranchised communities she serves, Lisa now sees her next growth edge in creating new, more diverse opportunities for healing that extend beyond traditional therapeutic modes. She envisions a future for her practice that includes other possibilities beyond one-to-one models of therapy, and hopes to develop and champion strategies that can affect change on a community scale. And in order to affect change on a broader scale, Lisa knows she will also need to make substantial changes in the way that she has historically worked, exploring new modes of collaboration with community partners. “That’s what I have to do,” she reflects. “I have to literally get out from behind my desk and turn over some of my responsibilities to other people. And I gotta get out there. I’ve got to connect more with policymakers, politicians, and influence some laws and policies.”
Looking ahead, Lisa’s biggest aspiration for the future is that the need for more robust and supportive mental health care becomes normalized in all communities, and in particular in communities of color. “We now have a lot more black and brown clients who are calling saying, ‘I want therapy,” Lisa says proudly, “That gives me a lot of hope.” And by modeling courageous leadership, Lisa also aspires to motivate younger leaders in her field to carry her mission and values into the future. “The other hope that I have,” Lisa acknowledges, “is that the leadership team that I have—who are literally young enough to be my children—at some point, ten years from now when I’m retiring, that they can take over my practice. And I will feel that I’ve helped cultivate a generation of people who understand the vision and who want to continue carrying the torch for children.”
You can learn more about Lisa Savage-Phillips’ therapeutic practice and career at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-savage-phillips-1773656/
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