Kirsten “Kiki” Lodal is LIFT’s Founder and Senior Advisor. She served as the organization’s CEO for more than 20 years, from its founding in 1998 until 2019 when she passed the torch to Michelle Rhone-Collins. LIFT began as an idea during her sophomore year of college and has become one of the foremost anti-poverty organizations in the country. Under Kirsten’s leadership, LIFT has fostered positive outcomes for hundreds of thousands of parents and children and established itself as a national model for more effective and human-centered social services. Along the way, Kirsten has become a leading advocate for re-thinking and modernizing the design of America’s anti-poverty programs, spreading LIFT’s message from the White House and Capitol Hill to the NBC Nightly News, the PBS Newshour, CNN and The New York Times. Her passionate championing of racial equity has been featured as a case study by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and Harvard University. Kirsten has received numerous honors for her work on behalf of families, including the National Jefferson Award for Public Service, established in 1972 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as our nation’s “Nobel Prize for community and public service” and the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award for young Americans committed to public service. She has been an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, a Kresge Foundation NextGen Human Services Fellow, and a member of the New America/Bloomberg Shift Commission on the Future of Work. Kirsten’s passion for the work of community care, deeply shaped by her two decades leading LIFT, called her to her current vocation as an inter-faith hospital chaplain and end-of-life doula. Kirsten is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Columbia Business School’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management, and Yale University. She lives with her husband, Jeff Himmelman, and three daughters in Washington, DC.