We live inside a story that says the good life is made of stuff. Lisa Merrick-Lawless spent twenty years helping tell that story — then decided to help write a different one. What if the most radical thing creativity could do right now is help people remember they're part of nature, not apart from it?

Lisa is a culture change practitioner and co-founder working at the intersection of creativity, nature and imagination. She is Co-Founder of Purpose Disruptors and co-creator of the Agency for Nature.

She spent two decades inside marketing and advertising learning how desire gets manufactured, how aspiration works, how culture shifts at scale — working as a Marketing Director at Coca-Cola, Marks & Spencer, Tetley and more and as a Strategy Director with  Unilever, WWF, Innocent and Greenpeace across the UK, Europe and the US. 

Then in 2018 she accompanied her daughter on her first climate strike and this reawakened a drive she had as a teenager to proactively create the world we want. 

She realised that advertising could be a creative part of this solution but it requires the whole system to change. So rather than simply leave, she decided to help people in the industry be part of a new future. In 2019 she co-founded Purpose Disruptors — a movement of 3,000+ advertising insiders working to shift the industry at a systemic level, so that the stories it tells help people live in harmony with the natural world. 

Her latest work starts from a more fundamental question: what if the real problem is that we've lost the felt sense that we are nature — that the separation is the story, and the story is the crisis? The Agency for Nature is a creative project to explore this. Each season, young creatives from top UK agencies are given one brief and one client: Nature itself. Now in its third season, it has produced a growing body of cultural work — films for TV, cinema and social, billboards, zines, radio and immersive experiences — designed to make a nature-conscious life feel genuinely irresistible to a youth audience who've grown up largely without it.

Lisa was one of Campaign magazine's Top 10 Trailblazers of the Year, was awarded Business Green's Communications and Marketing Professional of the Year and named in Forbes' 43 People Changing Advertising for the Climate. She is a regular speaker and has spoken at COP26 and Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, SXSW London, Blue Earth Summit and many other events. She is an advisory board member at Weston's Communicating Climate and was an assessor at Cambridge's Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

She lives in London with her husband, two children and a rescue greyhound, spending as much time as possible in nature or taking her VW camper van to surf spots around the country.