Sarah Giles (she/her)

Project Manager

Sarah is one of the founding Oregon’s Kitchen Table team members and now serves as an OKT Project Manager. She began working for Portland State University as a program coordinator for the National Policy Consensus Center in 2007, primarily focusing on national projects to support state efforts across the country that advance collaborative governance.

Sarah manages community engagement projects on a range of topics - from early childhood education to natural resources to election redistricting - of all sizes, from neighborhood size to statewide. She works with public agencies and decision makers to design processes, content, and outreach and coordinates a team of multicultural and multilingual facilitators, translators, interpreters, and community organizers to create ways for community members to share what they think in their own language and in ways that are most inviting and comfortable for them.

Sarah has a special interest in using plain language to connect complex, technical policy decisions to people's everyday lives. She also researches and writes on a range of issues related to collaborative governance, and has taught a collaborative governance capstone course at Portland State. She was previously a Research Assistant at Oregon Health and Sciences University. From 2002-2006 Sarah taught writing at the University of Arizona where she also received her MFA in Creative Writing.

Sarah holds a BA from Vassar College and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, where she taught English to elementary and secondary level students. Sarah gardens and loves craft projects of all kinds, especially with her two sons.