Our Team

Teams are staffed according to each of our client’s needs, and our network of partners, located in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, includes award-winning journalists, social media strategists, content writers, public policy experts, and political strategists. Together, we take a comprehensive approach to storytelling across mainstream, digital and social media platforms. Rise Communications is a values-driven media strategy and marketing firm that specializes in social impact public relations.

Lisa Richardson

Lisa Richardson is the President and Founder of Rise Communications LLC. 

Before founding Rise, Lisa was a long-time journalist at the Los Angeles Times, working first as a news reporter and feature writer before joining the Times editorial board. As a board member, she helped determine the newspaper’s official position on state, local, national, and international issues and affairs.

She left the Times to become director of communications for Los Angeles County’s Second District, which is home to 2 million residents and one of the most diverse communities in Southern California. Upon leaving the County, she became the first director of marketing and communications for Hueston Hennigan LLP, a new, now leading law firm headquartered in Los Angeles.

  • A native of Boston, Mass., Lisa has a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College, and studied Spanish literature, art, and politics at the University of Granada and University of Salamanca, in Spain.

    She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Public Relations Society of America. She serves on the boards of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Despite significant local pressure, she remains a Boston Celtics, Red Sox, and New England Patriots fan.

Raleigh Floyd Jr.

Raleigh Floyd Jr. is a two-time PRSA-Chicago All Star Award winning communications strategist with 25+ years of Fortune 50, national agency and small business experience. As a spokesperson and communication coach to c-suite executives for Allstate Insurance, Nielsen and Komatsu North America, he’s led teams focused on thought-leadership strategy, brand repositioning, product-launch publicity, website rebranding, digital strategy and high-stakes crisis communications. 

As a Rise core team member, Raleigh’s projects have included development and delivery of:

    • media training and digital marketing content for The Western Center for Law and Poverty;

    • stakeholder audits, messaging strategy and workshops for the California Wellness Foundation;

    • stakeholder audits of influential, Los-Angeles-area LatinX, African-American and Asian community organizations to support partnership opportunities with Cedars Sinai Hospital;

    • media planning, strategy and materials development for milestone events tied to the Destination Crenshaw construction project in the South Central Los Angeles area.

    Outside consultancy work includes digital content strategy for the Corporate Coalition of Chicago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as message/media training support for the American Medical Association.

    Raleigh is a graduate of Dartmouth College.

Jason Harris

Jason Harris is a seasoned communication strategist. Over his 35 years of experience, he has worked within the largest corporations in the world (McDonald's, ATT, Exelon) as well as led startups. His superpower can be defined in three critical areas:

Strategic Communication Planning: Working closely with leadership to translate business vision into business communication and leadership messaging.

Strategic Messaging & Stakeholder Alignment: Mapping communication solutions into achievable pathways for the organization, via stakeholder engagement and creating real time feedback loops. 

  • Strategic Employee and Field Execution: Creating an engagement strategy to support the business priorities, via sequencing execution through a combination of electronic and interpersonal channels.

    Harris is a graduate of Northwestern University with a Master of Science degree in Communication, with an undergraduate BA degree in Economics from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He has 5 adult children, and in his free time he can be found doing yoga, eating at local, ethnic restaurants, and practicing his photo collage art practice found at jasonbennettharris.com.

Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor is a political and public affairs strategist. He’s a trusted advisor to CEOs, elected officials, and nonprofit leaders that need to drive narratives, protect reputations, win campaigns, and promote social change.

His work has included developing strategic communications strategies and message campaigns to end oil drilling in Los Angeles neighborhoods, build consensus around public health priorities in the Mountain West, advocate for the release of a wrongfully convicted man on death row, and secure passage of equity-driven legislation that legalized marijuana in Illinois.

  • Chris is an alum of then Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential primary campaign and a two-cycle alum of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). At DCCC, he led the committee’s seven-figure paid media campaign to reach Black voters through the 2020 cycle. Chris led the revamp of the committee’s $30M+ people-of-color focused campaign investments in 2022 to deepen operational effectiveness, align key stakeholders, and strengthen the committee's reputational integrity. As a senior on-the-record spokesperson, Chris helped Democrats build narratives that led to the party’s best first-term midterm election results since the Kennedy administration.

    Outside the office, Chris is never afraid to remind you of his Midwest roots. He enjoys live music, painting on canvas, and experimenting with new recipes.

Martha Groves

Martha Groves is a lifelong journalist who worked as an editor and a reporter at three newspapers: the (late, lamented) Chicago Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times. A native Hoosier, she grew up in Lafayette, Ind., and received her BA from Indiana University, where she studied French, German and psychology before a late-inning switch to journalism. Her master’s of science in journalism is from Northwestern University’s Medill School.

At the L.A. Times, she covered a wide variety of topics for Business and Metro, including retailing, management, agriculture, technology, education, traffic and transit, land use and development, preservation architecture, McMansions, homelessness, coastal…..

  • access, the wildland-urban interface, the history of Los Angeles and fascinating characters. (During her Times tenure, she worked for five and a half years in the paper’s San Francisco bureau, writing about the economy of the Western United States, the wine industry, logging and banking, among other subjects.) A career highlight: In 2012, she became the first reporter to reveal the existence of P-22, the (late, lamented) mountain lion, in Griffith Park. Some of her best-read stories included first-person pieces about adopting and parenting her daughter, Nora Tai-Xiu Groves, who was born in China.

    Since retiring from the Times in November 2015, Martha has worked as a freelance writer and editor. She is the CEO (OK, sole employee) of Martha Groves Writing & More LLC. She has written online and print stories for clients including UCLA Health, Next Avenue, the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the USC Rossier School of Education and Cal Poly Pomona. She has also written for Austin Beutner’s nonprofit Vision to Learn, Fredric Roberts Photography Workshops and CALmatters. She has edited several books, including “Hollywood Bowl: The First 100 Years,” “Murder Most Foul: And Other Great Crime Stories From the World Press,” “The Gottlieb Native Garden: A California Love Story,” “Renaissance Futurities” and the forthcoming “Running the Show: Television from the Inside.” She recently self-published her first children’s book: “Sammy, the Seasick Sea Otter.” Martha is an alto in the All Saints’ Choir at All Saints’ (Episcopal) Church in Beverly Hills. She is on the board of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. She enjoys traveling, hiking and exploring Los Angeles and California. Martha is on Instagram @marthagroves and @grammarbootcamp.

Kacey Bonner

Kacey Bonner is a strategy expert and gifted storyteller with a focus on social impact and representation. She has a knack for telling compelling stories that bring complex legal issues to life by showing their very real human impact.

Over the past 20 years, she has moved from the high school classroom to leading strategic campaigns that drive intractable social and political issues forward. She has worked with clients to engage Black women around sexual health, build a new narrative to redefine public safety and encourage community reinvestment. To all her work, Kacey brings an invaluable lens that prioritizes justice and amplifying the voices of those who too often go unheard.

  • Kacey holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, is an avid traveler, and describes herself as a lifelong educator.

Alexander Drecun

Alexander Drecun is a Los Angeles-based photographer and cinematographer with a broad portfolio of work and skillsets that he would like to attribute to hard work, dedication, and diverse interests, but, if he’s being honest, is 87% luck.

As a photographer, he has had hundreds of images of portraiture and photojournalism published, shot for architecture, interior design, and real estate development firms, and built an art practice around street photography and landscapes. As a cinematographer, he has lensed commercials, industrials, music videos, award-winning shorts, and internationally-distributed features.

  • In short, he is very easily interested and enjoys pointing a camera at almost anything with the goal of communicating elegantly and accurately the things he finds interesting. His work can be found on his website, www.alexanderdrecun.com, and he can be reached at photography@alexanderdrecun.com.

Chris Daley

For over ten years, Chris Daley has worked with writers and other creative professionals as they present their work to readers, agents, publishers, and other stakeholders. As founder of Chris Daley Writing & Design, she consults with clients to improve their communications—creative and academic, written and visual. From designing websites and coaching writers to editing manuscripts and building platforms, she helps her clients get their work out into the world.

Named a Top Communications Coach in 2023, Chris was previously Director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, a private writing school for the brave, enthusiastic, and talented. She received her Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and she worked for several universities in New York and Los Angeles.

  • Previous design and editorial clients include Caltech Library, PEN America, literary journals Air/Light and The Rattling Wall, NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation, CMH Records, Shogun Tattoo, Circa Interactive, and authors published by Simon & Schuster, Pantheon, DC Comics, Random House, Hachette Book Group, Counterpoint Press, W.W. Norton, Flatiron Books, Hogarth, and more. She can be found at chrisdaley.com.