Erin Saberi

Senior Associate – Marketing, Government Affairs & PR

Erin is always seeking successful sustainable visions and program implementation. Her experience spans more than 25 years in the public and private sector and includes leadership positions in government and public affairs, policy development, advocacy and strategic communications. She specializes in working with executive leaders, public officials and organizations to build their communications and engagement capacity. Her time spent in two war zones, including witnessing first-hand a complete government collapse and societal descent into anarchy in the Balkans reinforced her dedication to strengthening healthy civic participation and collaborative engagement through negotiation, facilitation and inspired leadership and communications. Her clients have ranged from Governors, Presidential Campaigns, Members of Congress, non-profits and universities. She most recently served as a Strategic Consultant Fundraiser for Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie.

In 2012, she coordinated elected officials and donor suites for President Obama’s final campaign swing through California. Additionally, she worked with a host of Governors, Members of Congress and surrogate spokespersons securing national media interviews at the 2008 and 2012 Democratic National Conventions.

For much of the past decade, Erin managed strategic communications, policy, and partnership work in California for Casey Family Programs, a national operating foundation working to reform the child welfare system. She specialized in crisis communications, organizational and community engagement and in developing and facilitating collaborative forums to advance policy goals and increase public and policymaker awareness.

Previously she served in the Administration of California Governor Gray Davis; working both in the immediate office of the Governor as Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff and as Assistant Director for California State Parks where she led a complex and successful public-input process for urban park development in Los Angeles.

Earlier in her career, Erin worked on international policy in Washington, DC, Latin America and the Balkans. She began her career as a congressional liaison for a non-profit led by Ambassador Robert E. White. In that capacity, she directed all policy and relationship work on Capitol Hill, led fact-finding delegations to Latin America for Members of Congress and organized components of visiting Latin American political leader visits to Washington, DC. She was one of the first people in the United States to learn of the Jesuit priest murders in El Salvador in 1989 and she coordinated the response from Capitol Hill. In 1990, she led former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright’s election observation trip to Nicaragua.

Her work in international affairs extended to the Balkans in the 1990s where she served as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Country program director for Albania during a time of anarchic uprising and state collapse. Despite two official evacuations out of country, including a helicopter airlift by the U.S. Marines, she expanded the country program from advising a grass-roots non-profit organization to advising members of Parliament, the President and political party leadership in democratic development and governance. She also served as an advisor to the international diplomatic team working on government reconstruction, to the parliamentary constitutional development committee and as a facilitator of opposing political party leadership dialogue forums in support of the electoral and constitutional development process.

Additionally Erin has worked on coordinated campaigns, organizing women across party lines and served as Deputy Political Director for Washington State for the 2004 John Kerry for President campaign.

Erin served on the Board of the International Center, a Washington, D.C. non-profit with extensive work in Southeast Asia. She has also volunteered with the Sisters of Charity in Haiti, at the Kosovo/Albanian border during the 1999 international refugee crisis, at Ground Zero after 9/11 and currently volunteers with the California Foster Youth Education Fund.

Erin studied political science, religion and ethics and likes to write and sing American and Latin Jazz Standards, bring diverse groups of people together for fun and inspiration and think incessantly about the right message to advance your cause.