Sarah (Sally) Campbell

Senior Associate

Sarah (Sally) Campbell recently retired from her position as, director of training and leadership development at Everyday Democracy and became a senior associate. Sally has devoted much of her career to helping communities find ways to work together and solve problems. She has been working with study circles and dialogue-to-change efforts since the early 1990’s.  Starting with an interest in productive group process, Sally began applying those principles to community situations and exploring ways to bring all voices into the conversation and the solutions. Her early work focused on youth development, interfaith dialogue and education reform, and has expanded to include poverty reduction, early childhood development, sustainable communities, and multi-cultural community life.

In several capacities (Deputy Director and Director of Community Assistance) at Everyday Democracy, Sally has focused on developing trainings and other tools for community work. Working with staff and associates in community settings, she helps gather the lessons from the field, and develop new approaches to community problem-solving. She worked as coach, trainer, and technical assistance provider.

Sally often played a key role in national partnerships; such as working with the Northwest Area Foundation in their Horizons project, an initiative focused on poverty reduction in rural and reservation communities in seven states; collaborating with the Southern Rural Development Center on Turning the Tide on Poverty initiative; working with the Southern Poverty Law Center on the Mix it Up initiative; helping the Annie E. Casey Foundation develop resources and public engagement strategies for disadvantaged urban families; representing Everyday Democracy in a small working group developing dialogue resources for President Bill Clinton’s One America initiative; serving with the Community Relations Service of the US Dept of Justice Special Task force on church arson; and collaborating with the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory in a two-state project focused on connecting grassroots deliberation with state level education policy.

As writer and editor, Sally contributed to Everyday Democracy’s many publications, foremost among them, A guide for Training Dialogue Facilitators, and Organizing Community-wide Dialogue for Action and Change. She has also authored or contributed to several discussion guides for community dialogue.

Before she joined Everyday Democracy, Sally was the associate director of the Maine Council of Churches, a statewide ecumenical advocacy organization. In that role, she founded The Roundtable Center, a statewide agency dedicated to promoting citizen engagement efforts across Maine. Since 1995, at least 10,000 Mainers have taken part in study circles.

Sally holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Sweet Briar College. She also holds certification in advanced facilitation, strategic communications, group process and process design. She is a graduate of the Institute for Civic Leadership, Zeta Class, in Portland Maine.