Bio

Sarah Jakiel is a technical expert, strategist, and human rights portfolio manager with more than 15 years of experience countering human trafficking, child and forced labor, and gender-based violence. She is experienced in all facets of organizational leadership with a demonstrated commitment to racial, gender, and economic justice, and scalable social impact. Specializes in strategic partnership advancement, program design and implementation, new business development, cultivating senior talent, and managing to outcomes to advance the rights of marginalized populations.

Her team is focused on developing inclusive social and economic empowerment, education, and development programming in high-risk and marginalized communities.

Sarah previously served as Chief Program Officer at Polaris, where she led program design and organization-wide impact strategy focused on reducing slavery in the U.S. While at Polaris, Sarah launched and led the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a critical national resource focused on victim identification, increasing survivors’ access to quality services, and directing key data and intelligence to law enforcement, government, and institutional stakeholders positioned to help. She led targeted capacity building efforts of national hotline hubs in the U.K., Mexico, and Canada, and launched Polaris’ Data Analysis wing to learn more about the scope, size, and systems of modern slavery, helping to design strategic interventions to disrupt human trafficking networks. Sarah has collaborated closely with community partners, international and nongovernmental organizations, funders, technologists, and the private sector to forge effective cross-disciplinary partnerships to fight human trafficking at scale and drive long-term social change. Sarah thrives on improving efficiency, problem solving, and crafting innovative models to tackle the intersectional nature of social equity and justice issues.