Larissa Maxwell

B.A. Trinity Western University and Pacific Life College, 2011
MBA, UBC Sauder School of Business, 2021

From a young age, I’ve been drawn to stories that repair broken identities, uplift communities, reveal important truths, and shape leadership and systems. My own story is built on the legacy of my Italian, Scottish, and Irish ancestors—rooted in service, soul, and audacity—with family narratives of sacrifice, reclamation, and healing.

This has led me to work that is courageous and community-transforming, including national leadership roles in justice and social services, climate advocacy, ESG, therapeutic practice, and ethical storytelling. 

I’m a Board Member at the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, an abstract encaustic artist, and a lover of great food and quiet forests. I live on the territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (The Squamish First Nation) with my family and two pugs, Ollie and Otis.

We’re telling a lot of stories—our own, those of others, our environment, and those shaped by institutions and systems. But are these stories ethical, truthful, and safe? Do they empower—or do they exploit, sensationalize, and harm? Who gets to tell these stories, and who decides what gets shared and how? Are these stories doing what we think they are doing? Are they as effective as we believe?

My doctoral research, From Communities to Corporations: Ethical Storytelling in First and Second Person Narratives, explores how we construct and distribute stories across justice, healthcare, journalism, business, and climate action. I examine how urgent, complex, and traumatic stories can be told without manipulation, and how ethically grounded narratives—those shaped through consent, lived experience inclusion, trauma informed practice, and co-creation—can be just as impactful as extractive ones.

My research follows a multi-paper dissertation model, where each study builds on the previous one, contributing to a broader understanding of ethical storytelling. Through a combination of narrative inquiry, qualitative interviews, scale development, thematic content analysis, real-time audience feedback, and experimental testing of narrative responses, I explore three primary areas

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): How corporate impact stories can uplift rather than tokenize or harm.

• Climate Storytelling: Navigating urgency and truth without creating fear-mongering or false optimism.

• Documentary and Trauma: Building viewer sensitivity frameworks to protect audiences and subjects alike.

ethical storytelling, lived experience inclusion, living consent, trauma informed asset based narratives, consumption goal analysis;