Alison Wrigley Rusack Named Laguna Blanca Board Chair

The duties of chair of Laguna Blanca’s Board of Trustees were recently passed from Alixe Mattingly to Alison Wrigley Rusack. Alison—who has been a Laguna parent since 1996—co-owns Rusack Vineyards; serves as Vice Chairman and First Vice President of the Santa Catalina Island Company, which handles commercial real estate, hotel, and sightseeing operations on Catalina; and is a lifetime member of the Benefactor Member Board for the private, non-profit Santa Catalina Island Conservancy. She and her husband Geoff (who served as Chair of the LBS Board of Trustees from 2006—2008) have three sons. Austin ’11 and Parker ’16 currently attend Laguna Blanca and Hunter ’09 is starting his second year at Bowdoin College this fall. All three boys have attended Laguna since Kindergarten.

Alison graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in film and broadcasting, after which she worked in the entertainment industry in Southern California, most notably for Disney Consumer Products in Burbank. While at Disney, she served in both business and creative capacities including managing the international publishing program and the licensing program in Latin America, and working as a writer/editor for the creative development department of Disney Publishing, Consumer Products Corporate Communications, and Consumer Products International.

Alison currently serves on the Advisory Boards for Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California; she is also a director of the Cancer Center of Santa Barbara.

“We’re honored to have Alison at the helm,” Headmaster Paul Slocombe remarked. “Her extensive experience in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, combined with her passion for Laguna Blanca School, is an ideal formula for excellent leadership.”