Sara Padilla, MPH

Sara Padilla is a senior associate for KHA, where she brings more than 18 years of experience in project management, research, planning, and evaluation. In this capacity, she provides oversight to and coordination of events and activities for the Presidents’ Forum on Racial Equity in Philanthropy. She supports broader efforts via communications, project monitoring and evaluation, reporting, budget administration, client outreach and proposal development.

Over her career, Ms. Padilla has engaged in a broad spectrum of evidence-based activities for implementation of chronic disease prevention and risk management strategies through workplace programming, private-public partnerships and improved health management and data collection systems. Her experience includes coordinating the delivery of technical assistance focused on farmers markets, farm-to-school programs, food policy councils, and healthy retail to communities located across the nation under a CDC-led initiative funded by the American Recovery Reinvestment Act of 2009, Communities Putting Prevention to Work. Additionally, she has been engaged in program and policy development for chronic and infectious disease prevention and work-site wellness programs in Oregon, Washington and overseas.

A former Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic, Ms. Padilla is bilingual and has worked in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. She earned a BA in anthropology at the College of William and Mary and holds an MPH from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.