06/09/2026
Following the lead of new staff, longtime staff have also agreed to come out of the digital shadows to reintroduce themselves! First up, Sarah Smith, Executive Director and Co-founder:
Born in the year of the Fire Tiger, Sarah grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where she was a good student and big sister to many siblings – one whole, one half-, and a revolving door of step- and ex-step siblings. Sarah grew up reading voraciously and doing theater; in the world of theater, she learned the transformative and healing power of creative collaboration, of community over a shared project, and of the importance of stepping into someone else’s shoes.
Sarah left Colorado to attend college at the University of Puget Sound. A student of 18th Century Poetry, with an additional emphasis in Religion and Philosophy, Sarah graduated in 2008 - straight into the Great Recession, low on job skills but full up with a new group of comrades and ideas.
With not much for job skills or prospects to speak of, Sarah and friends started to ask what they might be able to learn that they hadn’t in their educations to date. The crew went into various crafts – and in their spare time started to dream up education programs that might equip youth with skills earlier than they had gotten them.
After a series of education model experiments, Sawhorse Revolution was born: a creative, communal response to the profound apathy, callousness, and cruelty of life in racialized late capitalism.
Sarah has grown up with Sawhorse – and Sawhorse with her - but beyond this massive commitment, she enjoys being a dabbler: spinning fiber, sewing, all kinds of building, cooking, gardening, piano, fly fishing, surfing, Vedic astrology, and on and on.
She is grateful for the chance to engage with questions of liberation for all beings, of repair, of meaning and search. Searching for what? As thse 18th Century poets indicated so many years ago – to search the infinite in the particular, for meaning in the every-day… meaning which is community, service, friendship, struggle,
love, creation, compassion, possibility, and wonder - the great Whatever and the great perhaps đź’›
