Lisa Wolff joined the Hopewell Valley Regional school board in 2009, a difficult time for the district. Divisiveness was high and progress slow. She believed that she could make a difference.
She approached board member Leigh Ann Peterson, who was up for re-election, and suggested they run as a ticket. At the time, they didn’t know one another. But Wolff says they met and found that they had a lot of the same goals.
They ran together and won. Seven years later, they still serve together on the board. Peterson is vice president, and Wolff is president for the fourth consecutive year. And on Friday, Oct. 14 at the annual Hopewell Valley Mayors’ Breakfast, Wolff will be honored as Volunteer of the Year by the Hopewell Valley Municipal Alliance for her years of service to the district and the community.
“Lisa has dedicated a tremendous amount of her time and an unwavering commitment to the youth in our community through her work on the school board and as a member of our executive committee,” Municipal Alliance coordinator Heidi Kahme said.
Superintendent Thomas Smith echoed Kahme’s comments.
“I don’t know an individual that works harder for the community than Lisa,” he said. “The time and effort she puts in, not only for the district but also for other community ventures, is really amazing.”
Wolff is president of the Mercer County School Board Association as well a member of the Stampede committee for the Hopewell Valley Arts Council. She has also been involved with the D&R Greenway Trust, the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, and the Hopewell Valley Soccer Association. For many years she was sales and marketing coordinator for Womanspace’s annual Communities of Light project.
The Volunteer of the Year award comes at a time when the school board is celebrating another triumph. The district held a referendum on Sept. 27 asking voters to approve a $35-million bond for school maintenance and improvements. The measure carried by a margin of almost two to one, with 1,825 for and 995 against.
Wolff says the passage of the referendum is one reason that the Volunteer of the Year award recognizes the work of the entire board. The board and administration spent three years preparing for the referendum, but Wolff says the district has needed to repair and upgrade its aging buildings since before she was on the board.
She believes that the board was able to finally hold a referendum and get it passed because it consists of members today who work together to solve problems. In her first two years on the board, she says, neither the administration nor the board could accomplish much. The board was too fractious to get things done.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” she said. “One of the things that was hard for me was that I came from private sector business. If you wanted to get something done, you could get something done. But between personality conflicts and the bureaucracy that goes with working with a public entity, I was frustrated with how slowly things got done.”
Now, she said, things are better. “For the last three, four years, we’ve really had a fantastic board. We don’t always get along, but it’s different,” she said. “When we don’t get along now, we all still respect each others’ opinions.”
Superintendent Smith came on board around the same time as Wolff. She says she and Smith have a good relationship, and she says his strong leadership is a major reason that the district is more effectively run than it had been. In the past, superintendents rarely stuck around for long, and Wolff says the community had developed the attitude that the superintendent’s views on issues didn’t matter much.
Smith, she says, established relationships and gained credibility from the start. “It’s allowed us to reinforce consistency throughout the district. Now I think the board is better, and the positive relationship between the superintendent and staff is well known. It’s amazing how quickly things have improved,” she said.
Stronger bonds between administration and school board, she says, have also led to a better relationship with the community. “I think that they trust us a little bit more, that we care about doing things the right way,” she said.
Wolff is a native of Skokie, Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign with a degree in math and computer science. She moved to Texas to work for a major telecom company, first as a software engineer and later in tech support. She found coding to be isolating, and found tech support difficult because it involved so much negativity.
She approached the sales manager and asked for a job. She had no sales or marketing experience, but she knew the company’s products well and felt she could sell them. The sales manager gave her a chance, and she ended up thriving in the new role.
“I loved it, because people who you go in to sell to are incredibly positive because they are looking for solutions. It’s a much different mindset from tech support,” she said.
She left to go work for a British-owned company, Micro Focus, which helpscompanies upgrade their legacy computing systems. There she moved into management, becoming a regional vice president. Micro Focus also brought her from Texas to Pennsylvania, where she met her husband, Paul Kinney. They married and settled in Somerset for a year before moving to Hopewell in 1996. The couple has two children: Zachary, a freshman at the University of Minnesota, and Ryan, a sophomore at CHS.
She earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and left Micro Focus to work for a startup tech company. After that fizzled, she became an independent management strategy consultant, which she still does today. Interestingly, while she has long worked with technology companies in her role as consultant, she has in recent years begun expanding into the field of education.
When she’s not working or volunteering, Wolff enjoys cooking. She’s taken courses at the Restaurant School of Philadelphia and though she says she’s more of a cook than a baker, she dabbles in sweets as well. At last years’s MercerMe Cut Throat Cookie Exchange, she won Most Creative Cookie with her chocolate macarons.
But mostly she likes to cook with organic vegetables, making ethnic dishes. She remembers wistfully the last dish she made for her father back in Illinois, before he passed away last month. “He used to call it bean pie,” she said. “It was a tart really, almost Mexican. It had refried beans as a base, with cheese and corn and cilantro on the top. Yep. That’s what he liked.”
Hopewell Valley Board of Education president Lisa Wolff, back right, with her family on vacation in Arkansas in 2015. Back left is son Zachary. In the front are husband Paul Kinney and son Ryan.,
