Alisa Y. Harrison, Ph.D.
Principal, alisa@aharrisonconsulting.com
Alisa Harrison (PhD Duke University ’08, MA University of British Columbia ’01) is an energetic leader, with a passion for enabling positive and strategic system change. She loves to solve complex problems, weaving evidence and experience together to help clients identify better ways to realize their goals. She is known for being both visionary and pragmatic, setting ambitious targets, and leading herself and others through the practical, incremental steps toward achievement. Informed by experience in health and community development, as well as scholarly studies of social justice, power relations, and mass democratic movements, she is deeply committed to the values of compassion, transparency and equity. She has demonstrated her skills at building the trusting, mutually valuable professional relationships necessary for success, whether the goal is to engage a constituency or audience, create and sustain partnerships, develop a rewarding workplace or healthy organization, or achieve specific project deliverables.
Alisa considers each project from multiple angles and works creatively to forge links between evidence and practice. Alisa has led projects for government, non-profit, and private sector organizations on topics including harm-reduction services for women with perinatal substance use; admissions processes under the BC Mental Health Act; safety in tertiary mental health facilities; the continuum of care for eating disorders treatment; health, safety and quality of care standards for the practice of seclusion; best practice in inpatient psychiatric treatment; anti-racism, cultural competency and diversity training; adult education; immigration; information sharing and homelessness research; and aboriginal labour market programming. Alisa has helped to develop and then overseen the implementation of new programming and practice to strengthen the primary care system in Victoria, such as new tools to improve communication between acute and community-based primary care, improved longitudinal primary care for frail seniors, and access to MSP-funded, low-barrier, evidence-based interventions for people with mild-moderate anxiety and depression.
With her work since 2010 focusing most closely on the public health sector, Alisa has collaborated with care providers, service users, system leaders and decision-makers, as well as community partners to improve access and quality, encourage evidence-informed practice, and create a safer, more sustainable health system. Most significantly, she has led the successful start-up of two non-profit health care organizations. In 2010-11 she led the development of an evidence-based service delivery model for the Looking Glass Foundation's Woodstone Residence, resulting in a multi-million dollar partnership agreement with the BC Government, and moved the new service through its initial staff recruitment and program-development phase. From 2012 through 2018, she was founding Executive Director of the Victoria Division of Family Practice (a partnership between the BC Ministry of Health and the Doctors of BC), where she was engaged by Victoria's family physicians to establish the organization from the ground-up and support physicians to organize their community. Alisa led the Division through six years of consistent growth, achieving measurable results in every area of the organization's strategic plan, and garnering widespread recognition within and beyond the sector. From February 2020 to the end of January 2021, Alisa served as CEO to the Midwives Association of BC, where she played a lead role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, resetting the organization's approach to government relations and negotiations, and working towards full integration of midwifery into BC's healthcare system, as well as supporting the board's transition from operations to governance, facilitating development of a new strategic plan, building new and nurturing existing partnerships, engaging members, embedding anti-racism and cultural safety into the association's operational and strategic priorities, and introducing quality improvement principles to organizational evaluation and practice. In 2021, she joined UBC CPD (Faculty of Medicine) as Interim Senior Manager of Rural CPD, and is now inaugural Senior Manager of Health Equity and Engagement, developing medical education to promote justice and equity in health services.
Before coming to consulting, Alisa enjoyed five years as an instructor at the University of Victoria teaching History and Women's Studies, and since 2018 has been Associate Faculty in the School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University, where she teaches in the graduate program in health system leadership. Alisa's experiences, interests and skills are broad as well as deep, and her fundamental curiosity means she is always open to new opportunities and challenges.
Alisa considers each project from multiple angles and works creatively to forge links between evidence and practice. Alisa has led projects for government, non-profit, and private sector organizations on topics including harm-reduction services for women with perinatal substance use; admissions processes under the BC Mental Health Act; safety in tertiary mental health facilities; the continuum of care for eating disorders treatment; health, safety and quality of care standards for the practice of seclusion; best practice in inpatient psychiatric treatment; anti-racism, cultural competency and diversity training; adult education; immigration; information sharing and homelessness research; and aboriginal labour market programming. Alisa has helped to develop and then overseen the implementation of new programming and practice to strengthen the primary care system in Victoria, such as new tools to improve communication between acute and community-based primary care, improved longitudinal primary care for frail seniors, and access to MSP-funded, low-barrier, evidence-based interventions for people with mild-moderate anxiety and depression.
With her work since 2010 focusing most closely on the public health sector, Alisa has collaborated with care providers, service users, system leaders and decision-makers, as well as community partners to improve access and quality, encourage evidence-informed practice, and create a safer, more sustainable health system. Most significantly, she has led the successful start-up of two non-profit health care organizations. In 2010-11 she led the development of an evidence-based service delivery model for the Looking Glass Foundation's Woodstone Residence, resulting in a multi-million dollar partnership agreement with the BC Government, and moved the new service through its initial staff recruitment and program-development phase. From 2012 through 2018, she was founding Executive Director of the Victoria Division of Family Practice (a partnership between the BC Ministry of Health and the Doctors of BC), where she was engaged by Victoria's family physicians to establish the organization from the ground-up and support physicians to organize their community. Alisa led the Division through six years of consistent growth, achieving measurable results in every area of the organization's strategic plan, and garnering widespread recognition within and beyond the sector. From February 2020 to the end of January 2021, Alisa served as CEO to the Midwives Association of BC, where she played a lead role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, resetting the organization's approach to government relations and negotiations, and working towards full integration of midwifery into BC's healthcare system, as well as supporting the board's transition from operations to governance, facilitating development of a new strategic plan, building new and nurturing existing partnerships, engaging members, embedding anti-racism and cultural safety into the association's operational and strategic priorities, and introducing quality improvement principles to organizational evaluation and practice. In 2021, she joined UBC CPD (Faculty of Medicine) as Interim Senior Manager of Rural CPD, and is now inaugural Senior Manager of Health Equity and Engagement, developing medical education to promote justice and equity in health services.
Before coming to consulting, Alisa enjoyed five years as an instructor at the University of Victoria teaching History and Women's Studies, and since 2018 has been Associate Faculty in the School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University, where she teaches in the graduate program in health system leadership. Alisa's experiences, interests and skills are broad as well as deep, and her fundamental curiosity means she is always open to new opportunities and challenges.
Contact us!
Find out how you can benefit from our expertise. E-mail alisa@aharrisonconsulting.com or
phone/text (250) 701-8634 to arrange a consultation.
Find out how you can benefit from our expertise. E-mail alisa@aharrisonconsulting.com or
phone/text (250) 701-8634 to arrange a consultation.
