Board Member

For over a decade, Sahar Wali has served as a senior communications strategist across the public and private sector. Her work includes developing winning narratives and strategies that have helped issues and organizations break through on both social and mainstream media. Currently, serving as head of communications for a 2 million-member labor union, her work centers on communicating change needed to improve lives for working families including access to affordable healthcare, creating good jobs and better wages.

Immediately prior, Wali ran an international communications campaign on climate science as the United Nations Foundation’s Communications Director for Energy and Climate. From 2009 to 2011, Wali served as a senior communications strategist in the Obama Administration as Communications Director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and Associate Administrator for Communications and Marketing at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) respectively.

Her background includes political campaign, congressional, non-profit and corporate communications work. She served as Oregon Communications Director on Obama’s 2008 bid for the presidency and has served as Communications Director for four members of Congress.

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants who grew up in Houston, Texas, Wali began her work in communications volunteering at a small non-profit working to deliver medical aid to Pakistani children injured in the 2005 earthquake. Her other volunteer efforts include helping the Houston Grand Opera compose immigrant stories into an opera celebrating the city’s diversity and raising funds to help the University of Texas at Austin establish its first Chair in Pakistan Studies. Sahar currently lives with her husband Michael Robertson in Washington, D.C. Sahar has been an active board member since 2015.

To me the fight to beat colorectal cancer is about increasing survivorship and early detection. The more we know, the better poised we are to beat it for good. I hope to help increase attention about the reality of colorectal cancer — that it can strike any one at any time and completely alter your life in an instant — and to push for greater support through funding of research and through policy change that bolsters screening, prevention, treatment options and progress towards a cure. I fight so that those in the fight are stronger and better supported and so that one day no one will ever have to lose this fight ever again.- Sahar Wali