Sarah Greenberger

Sarah Greenberger is Vice President of State and Federal Policy for the U.S. Nature Initiative, where she works to align conservation organizations, funders, policymakers, and partners around shared priorities and develop the policy, funding, and implementation strategies needed to achieve durable conservation outcomes.

Sarah is a senior conservation leader with more than two decades of experience across government and the nonprofit sector. Throughout her career, she has worked to bring science to bear on policy decisions, build consensus across diverse interests, translate conservation priorities into significant public investments, and connect local, state, and federal action. She has built trusted relationships across party lines with elected leaders, Tribes, state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, business and agricultural interests, and local partners.

Over nearly a decade at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Sarah helped develop and execute major federal conservation, climate, energy, and natural resource priorities. Most recently, as Associate Deputy Secretary, she served as a key advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary and led implementation of more than $1 billion in conservation-related investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. She developed the Department’s Ecosystem Restoration and Resilience Framework to align programs and funding around priority landscapes and conservation priorities as well as helped establish America's Ecosystem Restoration Initiative at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to support locally led conservation by states, Tribes, territories, and other partners. During her earlier tenure at Interior, Sarah helped lead the collaborative federal-state strategy for greater sage-grouse conservation, establish a conservation task force with Western governors, and lead major adaptation and resilience initiatives.

Between her two periods at Interior, Sarah served as Senior Vice President for Conservation Policy and Interim Chief Conservation Officer at the National Audubon Society. She built Audubon’s first comprehensive national policy program in decades and the infrastructure to execute it, connecting national policy and government affairs with the organization’s 22 state and regional offices and more than 500 local chapters. Her work focused on empowering state and local leaders to identify opportunities and mobilizing Audubon’s distributed network to advance conservation priorities from the local to the federal level.

Sarah began her policy career as Legislative Counsel to Senator Ben Cardin, working on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Water and Wildlife Subcommittee, and previously clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Earlier in her career, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zimbabwe and as a founding teacher at Bronx Preparatory Charter School.

Sarah holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. in History from Williams College.  She lives in Silver Spring, MD with her husband, two children, a dog and two cats.