Executive Board

Kari Isaacson retired from Walla Walla’s Blue Mountain Community Foundation in the fall of 2020 after seven years. Her work there to help the people of four counties in SE Washington and NE Oregon resulted in tremendous growth in assets, scholarships, and early resources for the 2020 US Census, and helping people through the 2020 flood and early days of the pandemic.

After retirement she volunteered for the local Democratic Party as a poll watcher in the 2020 general election. She became Party Treasurer in 2021 and was elected Chair in 2022. She is a lifelong Democrat whose first political volunteering was going door to door for candidates in the 1968 presidential election in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University and University of Oregon School of Law and had a successful 40-year career in the nonprofit sector. She has raised millions of dollars over her career to help people and has supervised annual grant budgets of over $25 million at several major foundations to help children and strengthen rural economies, including Native Communities. She also worked in business, with Frank Russell Company of Tacoma and as an executive with UnitedHealth Group. She has served on numerous nonprofit boards.

Growing up in a Scandinavian and Lutheran community in Portland, she comes from a family with a strong work ethic. As a kid she worked in the fields during summers picking strawberries, raspberries, and beans, and worked through college and graduate school. Her grandparents and great-grandparents homesteaded in the Midwest in the late 1880s and early 1890s, finally selling the land 100 years later. Like all homesteaders, they worked incredibly hard and also were incredibly fortunate as immigrants from Europe to be able to participate in a government program that provided opportunity.