Bio
Sarah J. Balland grew up in their parents' hometown of Cheyenne, Wyoming (the ancestral homelands of the Sioux, Arapaho, Lipan Apache, and Cheyenne Peoples). Her institutionally-recognized education includes a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology from Northern Arizona University and an MPA from the University of Utah. Prior to the ACLU, Sarah spent 15 years in Ogden and Salt Lake City working in the areas of domestic violence victim assistance, refugee and immigrant employment and labor, and public policy specific to energy economics and Indigenous Tribal sovereignty within the domains of nonprofit middle management and public sector administration. She spent a combined three years living and working abroad in Peru, Thailand, and Myanmar before her ethics around volunteerism and travel evolved.
Sarah is actively involved with SLC community-driven efforts in world-building, mutual aid, and Land Back. A trained cooperative developer, Sarah believes in the power of the worker-owner cooperative model as a vehicle for transitioning the dominant societal structure in which she lives to a Solidarity Economy; Sarah's vision for a solidarity economy includes people directly creating and constantly renewing their democratic processes, transforming their conflict systems to hold all of humanity in a non-carceral way, and owning the means of their own labor production as well as decisions regarding markets and time. Ultimately, Sarah's dream is to return law and economics back to the Commons for the benefit of all species on Earth.
Sarah identifies as a non-binary person of predominately European settler ancestry living on stolen Land. She is intentionally repairing her relationship with Self, Relatives, Home, and Land through the understanding, critiquing, and dismantling of the myths and scars that she inherited. If Sarah has a "life goal," it is to do their part in healing their family lineage from its assimilation to whiteness and adoption of settler-colonial violence as a way of life; Sarah believes these forces tore her ancestors from their original life-ways, resulting in extractive relationships with each other, the Land, and non-human species, as well as intergenerational trauma and the perpetuation of missing and murdered violence to Indigenous Peoples.
Sarah loves tending to and learning from the Land, dancing, film, comic books, writing, music, poetry, thunderstorms, and having deep metaphysical conversations with others with the intent of brokering greater understanding and relational bonding. They love being with their beautiful Partner and animal relatives, ample solo time, and all their beautiful People.