Lisa Gardner activates NAACP Spokane chapter with new energy

By Mary Stamp

As president of NAACP Spokane, Lisa Gardner seeks to inspire more of the 366 members re-engage with the 100 active members, both to strengthen the NAACP in the community and to build relationships when challenges arise.

Lisa referred to 2024 as a year of "peaks and valleys in responding to systemic racism"—highlighted by 460 people filling a Convention Center Ballroom for the Freedom Fund Banquet in November and the "phenomenal work" NAACP Spokane is doing to address some ugly incidents.

Lisa is grateful that leaders of the Spokane and Mead school districts were responsive and worked with NAACP Spokane to gather teachers, parents and community members to address recent incidents of racism.

At the Wilson Elementary, a music teacher invited children to dress as "slaves and hoboes" for a jazz concert. Football players at Mead allegedly hazed, bullied and racially intimidated athletes of color. Meetings on those incidents show the need to be vigilant, she said.

Along with annually educating the community for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month, Lisa listed some high points of 2024.

• Lisa recruited Priya Osborne who, as the new Youth Council advisor, built it to 28 members. It has been nearly 40 years since the branch has had a youth council to mentor youth to carry on the work.

• Civic Engagement held its second annual "meet and greet" events to spread word about the NAACP and involve more people. They also held candidate forums.

• The Healthcare Committee started a program to train students at Rogers High School to be lifeguards and took 24 students to Providence to learn about health care jobs.

• The Criminal Justice Committee is planning a program, "Building Restorative Communities," to promote restorative justice in city and county legal systems.

• The Education Committee is supporting staff and students of color in the school system, including screening a documentary, "The Right to Read," on the importance of literacy for black and brown children, and all children.

• For the Nov. 21 Human Rights Spokane Champion Awards, NAACP Spokane nominated The Black Lens for "its dedication to highlighting Black excellence through photography and storytelling."

Lisa shared the career, faith and community journey that brought her to be president of NAACP Spokane starting in January 2024.

When she was eight, Lisa began to tag along with her grandmother, Sarah Gardner, who was active in the NAACP, volunteered at the East Central Community Center and attended City Council meetings. Sarah, the first Black woman to run for City Council, lost in the primary. Soon after, she was murdered in the beauty salon she owned in 1987.

Lisa's mother and uncle left Spokane, but Lisa, who was then 13, stayed with her 80-year-old grandfather. In World War II, he had moved to Portland to work at a naval shipyard and settled in Spokane in 1946 as a Pullman porter and later retired from Spokane Community College maintenance staff.

In 2000, Lisa earned a bachelor's degree in communications and public relations. Then in 2003, she moved to Baltimore, Md., to work with public relations firms and earn a master's degree in management and public relations at the University of Maryland Global Campus.

There she shifted from navigating as a Black woman in a community where two percent were Black, to a large urban center that was 68 percent Black.

"It was culture shock for me to navigate in a bigger city, work in different industries and go from being a minority to being part of the majority with space and voice," said Lisa, who worked there with the National Institute of Health and a public relations firm that had McDonald's as their client.

In 2016, she moved to Seattle and started a marketing and communication consulting business, MQG Consulting, LLC. In addition to contracts with Microsoft and other entities, her primary contract was with the Office of Economic Development with the City of Seattle, consulting with 50 small businesses, giving each  one eight hours of free marketing advice. In 2020, COVID ended that work in Seattle.

When visiting her father in Spokane, she wondered if the City of Spokane would have a similar job. It didn't, but it needed a director of communications for the City Council. She applied and was hired.

Lisa said she was readily and graciously welcomed back to Spokane.

She did not think the NAACP was "her thing" until soon after she returned.

Kiantha Duncan, then the president, invited her to dinner and urged her to continue her grandmother's legacy. Lisa joined NAACP Spokane in 2021 and worked with the communication committee.

The late Sandy Williams also embraced Lisa on her return, inviting her to share her marketing expertise with small businesses through the Carl Maxey Center. Sandy relished that Lisa, like her, was "home grown" in a community where many Blacks are "transplants" who come and go.

In contrast to the "racial utopia" Lisa experienced in Baltimore, where she felt embraced as a Black woman, in Spokane she has to work to make space and have a voice for the NAACP.

"Growing up in Spokane, I was taught to be seen but not heard, to stay in my place," said Lisa, noting that's how her grandparents were raised in the Civil Rights era in the Jim Crow South.

The trauma of her grandmother's murder reinforced that idea, but Baltimore opened Lisa to new ways of seeing herself as a Black woman.

Lisa was baptized in Calvary Baptist Church and attended Mount Olive Baptist for two years.

In Baltimore, she did some church hopping, because there were so many Black churches. She attended a megachurch for two years, and another church with a popular, flashy preacher, a band and multiple services. Then she found Reid Temple in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., an African Methodist Episcopal church. Because it was 30 miles away, she began attending online.

"Fundamentally, faith gives us a foundation to do good and be a good human being," Lisa said. "With the dos and don'ts, we can easily lose sight that we are to love one another regardless of our different skin tones, backgrounds and beliefs. We are to treat each other with dignity and respect.

"Raised by grandparents from the South, faith is about respect," she said. "Once the foundation of faith is established in a child, it makes us grounded. We take it wherever we go."

She now sees her involvement with the NAACP, the City Council and Martin Luther King Jr. Day events as part of "my divine path."

As president, Lisa is encouraging the committees—Economic Justice, Environmental Justice, Youth Council, Legal Redress, Education, Civic Engagement, Criminal Justice and Healthcare—to build relationships in the community to challenge systemic racism and drive change.

Because NAACP members are community leaders and stretched thin, Lisa wants to recruit new members and activate more current members.

In 2025, the branch is using the national NAACP theme, "Keep Advancing."

Lisa suggested that not only is Martin Luther King Jr. Day a "day on," but so is every day.

"We must keep vigilant," she said.

"The work of challenging racial injustice may never be done, but we must establish relationships so when racial injustice rears its ugly head, we have partners," said Lisa.

She and branch leaders foster relationships in businesses, schools and the community so "we do not just call for help when things are bad, but partner when things are good," she said.

"In Spokane, Black people are often the only people of color in workplaces or at meetings. Partners in businesses and organizations can mitigate their experiences of racism, tokenism or insensitivities, so Black people feel they belong," Lisa said.

NAACP Spokane leaders were busy with speaking engagements for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and now with Black History Month events to build partnerships.

• Jaime Stacy, first vice president, spoke on living together in peace and love in a beloved community at the Spokane North Stake Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

• The Criminal Justice Committee co-hosted with the Spokane Jewish Film Festival a 6 p.m. reception and 7 p.m. screening, "Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round," on Thursday, Jan. 30 at the Magic Lantern.

• Lisa spoke Jan. 20 at the MLK Rally.

• NAACP Spokane is partnering with the Spokane Community College Black Student Union for Black History Month.

For information, visit facebook.com/spokane.naacp or naacpspokane.com.