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Sarah Gilliland is a senior policy manager in the New Practice Lab at �鶹������ý, working primarily in the early care and education portfolio. There, she leads the Implementation Working Group, a learning cohort of 20 early childhood leaders and locations across the country who focus on local delivery of early childhood services. Together with the Lab, this group has produced a body of “lessons learned” that can help future leaders avoid reinventing the wheel when launching, sustaining, or scaling local early childhood programs. 

She also works with colleagues in the Lab and across the Thriving Families issue area to better understand challenges in delivering early intervention (IDEA Part C) services to families, infants, and toddlers who need them, in the hopes of identifying and implementing fixes today while working towards a more ideal future state: a functional, cohesive, early childhood system that meets parent, children, and provider wherever they are at, and across the spectrum of care needs and preferences. 

A librarian by training, she spent 13 years as a career civil servant conducting nonpartisan policy and legislative research at the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Senate, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Executive Office of the President, with a focus on domestic social policy. She covered a portfolio of issues ranging from health care to labor to education to taxation, but the challenges facing lower-income families with young children felt more pressing, and she joined the New Practice Lab in 2022. Here, she works on the policy side of a multidisciplinary team dedicated to public problem-solving in close partnership with families, and continues to learn about the potential for human-centered design in policy work.  

Several years out of government, she still holds closely to GAO’s core tenets of accountability, integrity, and reliability; the value of the public sector; and the hard work of public servants at every level.

She is also a big believer in the power of libraries, empathy, and social connection.