Lisa Ann Sutkus 1974 - 2024

Lisa Ann Pukanala Sutkus was born June 27, 1974, in Honolulu. The next year her family moved to a homestead in upstate New York to live as much as possible off the animals and produce on the land and woods of their isolated 100 acres. Childhood for Lisa and her sister, Amy, was filled with nature and animals and farm work….and not very many people other than her family.

But working with people became the center of Lisa’s life. In Kindergarten, with so many others around her to learn about and be concerned over, she was pressed for time to take care of her own business. That pattern persisted for the rest of her life.

After grade school and high school in Gouverneur, NY, Lisa went on to graduate from Elmira College in Elmira, NY. One of her college years was spent in Australia.

In 1996 she headed to California to work as an AmeriCorps Volunteer in the Bay area. Her first assignment was in Oakland in an after-school program. Here she started to develop the facilitating and networking skills that marked the rest of her life. From Oakland she moved on to lead up the Marin County AmeriCorps team.

In AmeriCorps she met her husband of almost twenty-five years, Jimmy Yoo, who was also a Volunteer.

In 2000 Jimmy and Lisa moved to Denver, Colorado. Working for Remedy, a job placement agency, served to cultivate her natural aptitude to connect with all kinds of people, from CEOs and US senators to ex-convicts and the homeless.

In 2004 they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, Jimmy’s home. Lisa spent two years at Case Western University, in 2006 earning a Master of Science in Social Administration, which is what the Mandel School then called their Master of Social Work degree. She did an internship in the heart transplant unit of the Cleveland Clinic before accepting a position as a social worker in the Clinic’s liver transplant unit.

While in Cleveland, her son, Dylan, was born in 2007 and daughter, Catherine, in 2010. They became the focus of her life.

In 2010 Jimmy and Lisa, acting on their love of the West, moved to Beaverton, OR, where Lisa became the social worker in the Heart Transplant Unit at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland - a job she absolutely loved and a job that took full advantage of her capacity to empathize and bond with people. But in 2018 the Heart Transplant Unit closed down and the next year Lisa went to work for Genentech, a pharmaceutical company.

On March 19, 2024, an aneurysm in Lisa’s brain ruptured unexpectedly, resulting in her death.

She is survived: by her husband, Jimmy Yoo, and their two children, Dylan Yoo and Catherine Yoo of Beaverton, OR; by her parents, Bill and Carol Sutkus of Jefferson, OR; by her sister, Amy Sutkus of Aumsville OR along with Amy’s husband Lee Wolochuk and their two children, Milo and Phoebe Wolochuk; by her mother-in-law Haeho Yoo of New Jersey; by her brother-in-law Jeasung Yoo and sister-in-law Caryl Yoo of Cleveland, Ohio, along with their three children - Grace, Monti, and Micha; by her sister-in-law Heesun Chang of New Jersey; by numerous cousins, aunts, and uncles; and by the many people she touched in her life, more than anyone in fact realized. 

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