A note on behalf of Puget Sound Sage’s Board of Directors
Over the past three months, Puget Sound Sage’s board and staff have worked together to hire an Interim Executive Director that meets the needs of our growing organization. As mentioned in my previous letter, we chose to move forward with an Interim role to create the space and time we need to move the most effective, sustainable, and transformative work possible during this transitional period.
Over the past several years, Puget Sound Sage has grown by leaps and bounds, and we see this transition as the perfect moment to take a moment to pause and make mindful decisions about who we are as an organization and how we want to move forward together. As an organization that is accountable to and serves the interests of Black, Brown, Indigenous, female, LGBTQ, low-income, and disabled communities across the Puget Sound region, it is critical that we take this time to do both the internal and external work necessary to meet our mission of growing joyful and just communities for generations to come.
The Interim role will steward us in running an organizational assessment to determine where we need to grow, help develop the recruitment process for the hire of permanent executive leadership, and set up the organization for a successful strategic planning process in 2021.
To help guide us in this work is Esther Handy, our new Interim Executive Director, starting February 24th.
Esther joins Puget Sound Sage Sage after serving as Deputy Director for the Progress Alliance of Washington where she organized donors to fund our movement. Esther brings nearly ten years of experience as policy and political staff in local government including to former Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien and King County Executive Ron Sims.
At the City of Seattle, Esther worked closely with Puget Sound Sage and other community partners on campaigns to win Priority Hire, mandatory housing affordability programs, an equitable development framework, and raising the minimum wage. As Interim ED, she is eager to prepare Sage to kick-off a powerful next decade of winning research and advocacy campaigns.
Esther developed her own political activism as an anti-racist community organizer and she is committed to centering BIPOC community leadership and racial justice in our progressive movement. Esther and her husband Vivek are raising their daughter in Seattle’s Central District where you can run into them on the bus, or in many of their favorite parks and restaurants nearby.
As we get ready for Esther to join our team, we want to take a moment to extend our gratitude to Nicole Vallestero Keenan Lai, who served as Puget Sound Sage’s Executive Director for the past two years.
As board and staff, we thank Nicole for her commitment to the organization over the past seven years. Nicole first started at Puget Sound Sage as a Research & Policy Analyst who helped win living wages for workers at SeaTac Airport; Policy Director where she developed the research and framing for Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Ordinance; initiator of Sage’s Climate Justice Program; co-founder of the Fair Work Center which leads community implementation of local labor laws; and, ultimately stepping into the role of Executive Director at Sage in the fall of 2017.
Nicole has taken on a new role as the Senior Development Manager for our national network, The Partnership for Working Families and can be reached at nicole@forworkingfamilies.org.
We are excited to move forward in this new chapter as an organization, and will continue to keep you updated throughout the year.
Onward,
Michael Ramos, Board President