Her Story
About Sara
Sara HicksWest leads Phoenix Collaborative LLC, a consulting firm she founded in March 2025. The firm focuses on strategy and capacity building, helping organizations make sense of chaos and navigate complexity in disaster response, resilience, and homelessness. HicksWest draws on her prior experience as an EMT working on an ambulance and in the criminal justice space. After earning her master's degree in Psychology, she transitioned into emergency management, combining critical thinking and strategic skills to support vulnerable populations through equitable and just systems. She holds a bachelor's degree in Applied Criminology and a Disaster Program Manager Certification from the American Red Cross. Her approach emphasizes listening to stakeholders, building relationships, connecting resources, and fostering resilience across interdependent systems rather than reacting in silos.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sara
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Take every opportunity you've got. It's really easy to get comfortable or put off opportunities because of fear or stress of change, but the more opportunities you take, every time you put a step forward and show up even when you might have a little anxiety, those are the spaces where you grow and more doors open.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Listen before solving problems. The people closest to the problem often might actually help us get to a better solution. Make sure everybody who has a stake in the game is connected to finding a solution.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The landscape is changing rapidly with funding sources changing in disaster resilience, homelessness, and gender-based violence spaces. At the same time facing more intense disasters due to climate, housing shortages, public health challenges. Need to get out of silos and see how interdependent systems are to build more resilience instead of constantly reacting.
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