Meet Our Staff

Rev. Lisa Fitzpatrick is Senior Pastor of Culver-Palms United Methodist Church and has been serving in the California-Pacific Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church since 2019. Prior to that she served as clergy in the Louisiana Annual Conference. She has over 12 years in pastoral ministry and over 20 years serving the Methodist Church in music, youth, and tech ministries. Pastor Lisa is the Co-Founder and former Executive Director of APEX Community Advancement, Inc./APEX Youth Center She is a former healthcare executive who has over 25 years of management and public health policy experience. APEX Youth Center operated for nearly a decade as a drop-in youth center in Central City, New Orleans, providing services to vulnerable populations, particularly underserved youth and their families.

At the age of 23, Lisa became a survivor of gun violence when two children were forced to shoot a random stranger as part of a gang initiation. While the physical wound was only a bullet graze to her face, it became a life-altering experience for Rev. Fitzpatrick. In her words, “I realized in an instant, when I saw their terrified faces, that I was not the victim here. I was simply collateral damage in a war that neither I nor the children who shot me started. The victims that night were holding the gun.” This affected the way she began to look at issues of gun violence, mass incarceration, racial inequity, and childhood trauma, and became the impetus for her work in public health and in the founding of APEX Youth Center.

Rev. Fitzpatrick is the mother of 6 children, step-mother to 2 and she and her husband Danny have foster parented over 20 additional children and teens. Pastor Lisa has given the opening keynote with David Brooks at SXSW in 2019, and participated with the opening of Aspen Institute's The Weave Project with David, Katie Couric, and others. She previously held a position on the City of New Orleans Mayor’s Strategic Command Task Force in both the R.E.S.E.T. role as a pastor and as Executive Director of APEX on the Community Providers’ Board. She is the former Faith-Based Coordinator for the City of New Orleans. She is a 2013 CNN Hero and has been named a 5-Hour Energy Amazing Person, a Christian Science Monitor “Difference Maker”, as well as awarded a Harvey's Hero title from The Steve Harvey Show for her work with New Orleans youth and families in creating peaceful communities and safe space for youth and young adults.