Meet New Story’s First CDO, Liezl Van Riper

We’re proud to welcome Liezl Van Riper to the New Story team as our first chief development officer!

Over the past two decades, Liezl has built a tremendous reputation and resume across the social enterprise sector. We’re honored to have her design and lead New Story’s fundraising strategy as we aim to impact 1 million people by 2030.

“I am personally and deeply excited about New Story’s market-based approach to solving one of the world’s biggest challenges – transforming the broken housing market for low-income families in the global south.” — Liezl Van Riper

Liezl brings more than 20 years of social impact experience, most recently as the founding partner of Raise Up serving as a strategist to a global roster of high-impact for-profit and non-profit social enterprises.

She served as the VP of development at myAgro where she co-developed and launched a three-year strategy to raise $30 million in philanthropy and working capital. In two years, she helped more than double the team’s philanthropic revenue.

A couple of her biggest fundraising achievements include co-leading myAgro’s winning proposals for two of the most competitive awards in social enterprise, the Skoll Award and the Lipman Prize at Wharton Business School. She also helped establish a $2 million working capital loan between Skoll Foundation, KickStart, and Citi (Citi’s first loan directed to the social enterprise sector).

Before leading at myAgro, Liezl was the director of development at Kiva, where she built their NYC team and raised more than $5 million in grants and revolving loan capital in her first 18 months from corporate partners including PepsiCo Foundation, Pearson, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, and Pershing Square Foundation.

Liezl is joining the New Story team in an ideal season as we fully commit to a market-based impact strategy. The sustainable model unlocks access to more capital previously untapped in our first eight years as an organization.

“I want to seize on the opportunity that has been created by New Story’s evolution to a market-based approach, and accelerate fundraising from funders and investors that prioritize scale, cost-sustainability, and importantly the life-changing impacts that access to housing creates for disadvantaged families.”

We can’t wait to see how Liezl’s leadership helps us impact 1M families with adequate housing by 2030.