Founder Bio
 | Lisa Pederson Creator & Founder of Bake for Hope President and CEO, Cause Good, Inc. |
Lisa grew up in numbingly cold, but very friendly, Minnesota, surrounded by friends and a large extended family--19 aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozen. She studied marketing and computer sciences in college and held a variety jobs ranging from waiting tables in local restaurants to managing projects for a manufacturing company-she even worked for Prince for a time (hasn’t everyone in Minnesota?). Finally, after 30 years, she left the cold northland and headed west to warmer climates.
She now works as a Business Analyst for a global company based in sunny San Diego. While she loves living in her condo blocks from the beach, she misses the large network of family and friends back home--with their cold hands but warmest of hearts--that nurtured and supported her through her youth and early adulthood. Her desire to recreate that sense of home and community first led her to begin planning and organizing community events in support of worthwhile causes.
In 2007 she founded Party for Charity (www.partyforcharity.org) , and through it produced two successful events in one year: an art auction and live jazz concert at a beautiful downtown San Diego hotel that raised money for orphaned children in Indonesia, Thailand and Africa--more than sixty artists and several businesses joined in to support this great cause; and an outdoor family fun event raising money to send Adonica Shaw, Miss Black California, to Africa as an ambassador from the US with shoes and books for hospitalized children--yet another community of musicians and actors brought together for a worthy cause.
Though these projects were successful and fulfilling, she wanted to develop something with much broader scope that would offer a simple opportunity for people everywhere to get involved. She wanted to see a global network of individuals connected in community and actively participating in the creation of a better, kinder future.
Thus began Bake for Hope (www.bakeforhope.org)--an idea inspired by a vision that came to Lisa after meeting a friend who had lost his wife to breast cancer. It was so simple and so perfect because it invited everybody to participate--nationwide or perhaps even worldwide-- in a way that anyone could manage, and it would be run completely by volunteers. As you can see from this website, the Bake for Hope project has gone quickly from dream to reality with local organizations already formed in major cities across the country.
To manage an event of this scale, Lisa is creating a new organization named Cause Good (www.CauseGood.org) that will be incorporated as a non-profit corporation (501C3) able to accept tax-free charitable contributions. Cause Good will allow Lisa and like-minded volunteers to expand their efforts to organize a global community of people interested in creating in a better world through direct participation in projects like Bake for Hope.