Tyler Norris, M.Div.

Healthy people in healthy placeS

Tyler Norris, MDiv, is a social entrepreneur and trusted advisor to philanthropies, partnerships and government agencies working to improve the well-being of people and place. For over four decades, he has shaped health and development initiatives in hundreds of communities in the U.S. and around the world and built over a dozen business and social ventures.

Tyler is chair of Investing in Flourishing, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a board member of National Academies of Sciences’ Forum for Children’s Well Being. He is a senior advisor to the CEO Alliance for Mental Health, the St Luke’s Health System, Brain Futures, the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative and MAPS. He is the current board chair of Zendo Project, on the board of the Global Flourishing Study, and recently cycled off the board as a founding member of Mindful Philanthropy. Tyler serves as a non-denominational chaplain and as a leader of crisis intervention teams on city streets and at festivals.

From 2017- 2022, Tyler served as founding CEO of Well Being Trust, which for its first six years was a national-facing impact philanthropy with a mission to advance mental, social and spiritual health of the United States. In this period, Well Being Trust invested over $65 million in 240+ initiatives and helped build a portfolio of sustaining organizations to accelerate the social movement for mental health and well-being in the US.  Previously, Tyler led Total Health at Kaiser Permanente, applying system payroll, purchasing and investment portfolios to benefit the economic, social and environmental contributors to health. He was on the Board of Trustees of Naropa University for a decade (2012-2023), serving as its Board Chair for his last two years.

Over the decades Tyler helped start Step Denver; facilitated the opening of the Abraham Path through the heart of the Middle East; was founding president and CEO of Community Initiatives and Trendbenders LLC, as well as founding board chair of IP3, the social enterprise that gave birth to the Community Commons, a GIS data mapping and stories platform. Tyler was founding chair of the mental well-being initiative in his home community in Idaho 2023-25. In the early 1990’s, Tyler led the Kuhiston Foundation to help establish the national park system and micro-finance in Tajikistan.

Tyler is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Executive Leadership Program, earned a Master of Divinity from Naropa University, and has a bachelor’s degree in World Political Economy from Colorado College. He lives and serves in the communities of the Wood River Valley of Idaho and Oakland, California.