Lisa Madden, 2026 Outstanding Women in Business Recipient

Lisa Madden is the Chief Executive Officer of Riverbend Community Health Center

Lisa Madden
Chief Executive Officer, Riverbend Community Health Center

Lisa Madden was drawn to a mental health career from personal experience. When she was a young child in the ’60s, Lisa would accompany her father to visit her Aunt Peggy, who was developmentally and mentally disabled and had been institutionalized in Massachusetts when family members could no longer care for her.

Even at age 5, Lisa remembers, she didn’t think her aunt was being properly treated.

“Everybody had been emptied out of the institutions, and that didn’t necessarily mean that everything got better,” says Lisa, the chief executive officer of Riverbend Community Mental Health.

She initially was going to become a lawyer but ultimately chose social work. She first worked at an emergency shelter and diagnostic center for mentally ill adolescents both before and after studying at Clark University, where she completed her undergraduate studies.

Q. What did you learn from your early years as a social worker?

That we had a lot of work to do. That there were a lot of people who had good intentions, but there were some really bad policies and really not sufficient resources to meet the developing need of those living with mental illness, from young to old. Deinstitutionalization was great, but it didn’t necessarily come with a complete package of community supports. Those supports needed to be developed. They needed to be available and needed to be funded. And, of course, they needed to be staffed. What I learned early on is how to manage and work within a larger system of care, not just the place where I worked. How does DHHS play in, how does the justice system play in, how does the school system and employment world play in so that people are seen as a whole person and not just a person with mental illness?

Q. Was your path to an executive position a natural one as part of your work? Or were you determined that you wanted that to be part of your journey?

I think it was really both. I pretty quickly got into leadership roles in any position, but my master’s degree from the University of Connecticut was specifically tailored toward having clinical skills and administrative skills. I went into something where I knew that I wanted to take some of my passion for public policy, do the clinical work — I was a therapist for many years — but then add to it what can we do to be able to enhance the system of care. I think it was somewhat my destiny. It was a conscious decision to be able to go and say, what can we do better, and what can we learn from the folks in the field doing the work every day with patients, with consumers? What’s missing? What do we do to create it? How do we get them the support they need?

Q. You became president and CEO of Riverbend in May 20, 22 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. What were some of the big decisions you had to make right away?

I certainly wouldn’t recommend starting a CEO position in the middle of a pandemic. That was pretty difficult. What was really troubling for me is that my nature is to try to align with people and understand people’s needs and be present and be able to be in the community and at their clinical settings. That was really not permissible at the time. We were very much isolated to telehealth and telecommunicating and had pretty restricted time together in a meeting room. Everything was little pictures on a screen, which was not consistent with how I typically engage folks. The first 18 months to 24 months were very, very hard.

And then there were the employees. Their family members were getting sick. They had lost people in their lives. They weren’t immune to the pain of the environment we were in. They were living it too, and coming in every day to take care of those who needed their help. And quite honestly, for those living with mental illness and addiction, it wasn’t really where there was a lot of fanfare.

Q. You oversee a 350-employee organization. What are some of the challenges of managing such a large group of people?

You win as a team or you lose as a team. I was an athlete in my youth, and my son was a big athlete. The thing that we always talked about is you don’t do this alone. There’s nothing about my work that I do alone. I have a remarkable senior leadership team, remarkable directors and people who provide direct service. My job is to provide them with the support they need to do their job and make sure they have all the tools and all of the support that they need to do it. What we try to do the very best that we can is secure our funding, because securing our funding allows me to keep people doing the job. And funding for community mental health is very fragile.