If any of you have spent more than half an hour at Bus Stop, you've probably met Sarah. She's a regular and has been for years. I think I met her in 2009 when I first started hanging out there again. She's tall and blonde and totally amazing. She's really got her stuff together and knows how to get things done. If you've been paying attention to Seattle news, you've seen her work - King County is starting to change the way restaurants display food safety scores, and that is because of Sarah. She has gotten E. Coli twice, once in the Jack in the Box fiasco, and again a couple years ago from eating at a restaurant that is now closed. So she is understandably big on food safety. Anyway, she started a petition that got the attention of King County and is now the only person on their exploratory committee that is not involved in the restaurant industry. She knows 50 billion people and is a fantastic sounding board for ideas, both building on them and playing opposition for them.
So. Sarah is connected and knows how the system works. How did she get that way? Well she started off political, moving from Oak Harbor (yes, she's an island girl - her family owns a clothing store up there that has been around for 3 generations) to Seattle to DC after school. She spent time in DC learning the national political processes and meeting people that would help her start her own projects for non-profits and government agencies. Her focus is on open government and transparency, which are words that get bandied about in the political sphere that no one seems to know how to implement. Sarah knows how. In fact, she's writing a handbook on it. In any case, after DC, she moved back to Seattle, where she didn't know many people in local government or quite how to navigate it, as apparently it operates in a slightly different way. So she did IDF in 2006. Now she knows 50 billion people, and knows how to get things done here.
Sarah and I have become friends over the years, bonding over shared woes after political defeats and shared joys at progressive political victories or ideas. We've had countless debates with other customers over policy and oversight and government spending. We've had some heated ones about climate change and the depletion of our oceans. And last year, Sarah really got after me about applying for IDF after my diatribe about the Washington Health Benefit Exchange. Of course, at that time Jonathan and I were remodeling the kitchen with plans to add a bathroom, and I was not keen on giving up my weekends to spend time running around Washington with 30 people I didn't know. Plus there was an application, and I'd have to revamp my resume and get references and write a cover letter, and it was hard to do that during football season, and I wanted to finish my degree so I knew I'd be working on homework and reading and any number of other legitimate (and not) reasons why it was not a good time for me. But she kept talking about how much fun she had, and what great friendships she forged, and how much she learned, and how it set her up for any number of job offers...
I guess what really got me was the prospect of job offers. Selfish as that may seem, IDF sounded like a wonderful way to both better myself as a political citizen and get a real career going. Sorry Elias, but we all know I can't work at Bus Stop forever. So I decided when she started talking about it again this year (Sarah's prepared - the inundation began in late September) that this was going to be the year I started trying to get into IDF.
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