Since becoming president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP in December, Lisa Gardner has responded to several racist, culturally insensitive, and upsetting episodes in the region, leading her to wonder if her predecessors had witnessed this much activity and what has brought on what feels like a sudden onslaught of hate.

It's a new experience for Gardner, who never had any presidential aspirations. As a communications professional, she describes herself as a behind-the-scenes figure who prefers supporting others, much like in her role as the director of communications and community engagement for the Spokane City Council. Yet when she moved back to Spokane in 2020, many in the community still remembered her grandmother's legacy as a leader and activist for the NAACP in the 1960s and 1970s and encouraged Gardner to continue her grandmother's work. 

Kiantha Duncan, the NAACP president at the time, invited Gardner to her home for dinner and asked her to join the organization. Sandy Williams, the late founder of the Carl Maxey Center and the Black Lens newspaper, wrote a feature signaling Gardner’s return to Spokane. 

“I always looked at it as like, that’s my grandmother’s thing. It wasn’t anything that I necessarily wanted to do,” Gardner says. “And Kiantha said, ‘You have to continue your grandmother’s legacy; you’re kind of a boomerang. You came back home, why not join the NAACP and complete that legacy.’” 

Gardner joined the NAACP as a member at-large and communications chair, in keeping with her desire to play the support role. In three years, the NAACP saw two presidents leave, pushing her to the forefront of the organization. While she never had any aspirations to lead the organization, she embraced the growth and responsibility that comes with the position. 

“I’m used to always supporting someone who is actually taking charge and at the helm of things,” Gardner says. “Now I’m learning to lean into leadership, and it’s taking me into new professional growth that I was not planning for myself, but it’s obviously something that the universe put on my path, and I welcome it because I’m growing.” 

In her role, Gardner says she’s discovered that her leadership style is that of a coach. She wants to help others be successful and shape them into future leaders. She sees her coaching style as an inherent byproduct of her family dynamic in which many relatives are also coaches. Additionally, she draws inspiration from her late grandmother, who raised her from the time she was born until her death when Gardner was 12 years old. 

“By watching her I know what leadership looks like,” she says. “I know what leadership looks like, and I believe there are community leaders here in Spokane. I definitely look up to our council president, Betsy Wilkerson, because she’s dynamic. She’s very diplomatic, and she has to navigate tough waters.”

As a full-time employee of the city of Spokane and leader of a historic organization, Gardner says she deals with situations day by day. She wants to continue to build others' leadership and impart the bravery and courage that comes with stepping into leadership. And she hopes to make a change. 

“I want to at least put my mark on these different systems. I want to be able to meet with superintendents, with presidents and directors of the medical system, and business owners,” Gardner says. “I want to be able to forge these relationships of change.” 

Return home 

Gardner was born and raised in Spokane and received her bachelor’s degree in communications from Eastern Washington University with minors in journalism and African studies. In 2005, she left Spokane for Baltimore in search of opportunity she felt was lacking for her as a Black woman here. During her time away, she gained work experience and earned a master’s degree in public relations and management from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Before she returned to Washington state in 2018, she founded a marketing and consulting agency, MQG Consulting LLC.

“I wanted to be a publicist,” Gardner says. “I like trying to put other people to the forefront and help push whatever issue or whatever thing we need to clean up.” 

Gardner moved to Seattle and had contracts with Microsoft Corp., Seattle’s Economic Development Department, and the Rainier Chamber of Commerce. 

Then COVID hit, and Gardner didn’t know what to do.  Her family, still in Spokane, told her to come home, and while hesitant, she came to visit. 

“I came to Spokane for a couple of weeks and in the midst of just searching, I saw that the City Council was looking for a director of communications, and here I am,” she says.  

Earlier this year, Gardner joined a Women of Color in Leadership cohort. Sponsored by Spokane-based Empire Health Foundation, Gardner and three other women of color in Spokane participated in a six-week course this spring in which women from all over the country met once a week online to discuss articles and life experiences and help each other navigate difficult situations. The course culminated in a Women of Color in Leadership Summit, in North Carolina, in May. 

“That’s where I had the aha moment where I learned that I have more of a coaching style of leadership,” Gardner says. 

The experience has helped her grow and allowed her to connect with others who understand the challenges associated with being a woman of color in leadership. People of color in general are thrust with microaggressions, stereotypes, and implicit biases, she says, adding it's often understood that to get ahead, one must work twice as hard as others to prove themselves worthy. 

 It also means staying calm in situations where people assume because of your race and gender that you’ll buckle under pressure or have an emotional response. It also means being resilient when terrible things happen and stoic in decision making, Gardner says.

“But also, being visionaries,” she says. “Women of color, we can usually see things clearer because our social status is usually at the bottom. We have a different perspective and a different view of how to navigate in a lot of these systems.”  

That perspective has helped her understand the seeming uptick in racist, culturally insensitive, and even violent events that have occurred during her tenure.

The reason for the uptick is multilayered, she says. Racism and intolerance had mostly laid dormant during the past couple of years, but now that we’re out of the isolation of the pandemic years and have entered a political campaign year, racism is materializing again. 

“It’s always been there,” she says. “I think that we all had our blinders on because of everything else that was happening, but it’s always been there. … In the five months that I’ve been in my position, there’s been incident after incident after incident. And yes, each time we see it, I’m going to call it out because, one, that is the right thing to do, and two, with the NAACP, we’re not going to sit back and let these injustices happen.” 

While no single event is greater than the others, what is most troubling is when it happens to our kids, Gardner says, citing alleged hazing incidents in the Mead School District and the newsletter written by a Wilson Elementary School music teacher asking students to dress as “slaves, hobos, or ready for a night out to the jazz clubs.”  

“If they are experiencing this type of insensitivities and cultural missteps at a young age, that is trauma that we’re feeding these children that are going to one day be adults in society,” Gardner says. “If racism keeps happening, it’s not just the people of color who are going to want to leave, but families will also decide not to spend their money or live their lives in a place that harbors hate and tolerates it.” 

When the University of Utah women’s basketball team had racial slurs hurled at them from men in a truck waving a confederate flag during their visit for the NCAA tournament, Gardner condemned the actions in an article for the Black Lens and cautioned that racially targeting and harassing visitors could drive away people, opportunities, and economic benefits to the region. Since then, Gardner says she’s learned that the Coeur d’Alene Resort and the convention center have been losing business. 

“The blowback of what happens in Idaho lands on us here in Spokane, and that’s where Spokane really has to prove itself,” Gardner says. “If we want to continue to progress and we want to be that city that really welcomes events such as a world cup or an Olympics, we have to be a city that is attractive enough.”