Lisa Glanville Taylor

Lisa Glanville Taylor’s children now have children of their own, but she can still remember being a young mother with three preschool-aged children and how the job can sometimes be overwhelming. “I had a wonderful husband with a good job, and I could still get overwhelmed,” Taylor says with a soft smile and a sigh. “I can’t image what it could be like for someone with no support system.”

A member of the Minneapolis Junior League at the time, she volunteered for a community housing hot line, then for a Junior League child abuse project, and, finally, joined the task force that bore the Crisis Nursery, the iconic Twin Cities institution that has sheltered more than 40,000 children and fielded 68,000 crisis calls since its inception more than twenty-five years ago. “It was all an incredible learning process,” says Taylor, who was in a graduate-level child psychology program at the University of Minnesota before dropping out to raise her family. “Nothing you could learn in a book.”

Taylor became the first chair of the Crisis Nursery board of directors and worked within the organization for five more years before she moved on. “When they started talking expansion, I stepped aside,” Taylor says with a laugh. “I am very proud of that place, but I was exhausted.”

Taylor’s penchant for volunteerism began during her youth in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where her mother had cofounded the children’s theater and always took an interest in community involvement. Taylor volunteered at a school for delinquent kids, where she met two brothers, eight and ten, who used to get in trouble for driving stolen cars—one helming the wheel, the other working the pedals. “I always thought to myself, ‘If you could channel that energy in a positive way, just think what they could accomplish!’ ” says Taylor.

Taylor turned her volunteer passion into a career with the Courage Center, where she was volunteer services director. But lately, she admits to “episodic” rather than long-term volunteering, working on projects for institutions such as AccessAbility and the Minneapolis Synod of the Lutheran Church, before moving on to the next challenge. “You never know who you will impact,” she says. “But if you impact one person, who impacts another person, then you have something.”