Who is your host?

Saara (she/her) is an antiracist educator whose pursuit of liberation stems from her own lived experiences as a multiracial woman of color who grew up in and navigated predominantly white spaces and the harms of racism, sexism, and classism. As a facilitator, Saara has deep experience working with BIPOC educators, BIPOC leaders, and white leaders as they unpack the ways their racialized and intersecting identities, and has a particular skill in creating spaces that center BIPOC voices, needs, and experiences through a lens of healing from racial trauma. Saara began her professional journey as a classroom teacher with a Master’s in Teaching. Saara is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda. She has traveled, taught, and learned extensively throughout the world for over 15 years.

As an educator who specializes in adult learning, she has attended, presented, and planned conferences, trainings, professional developments, workshops, learning series, and is dedicated to creating a unique learning experience that centers shared humanity and desire for new learning and understanding, and there is no better medium for that work than over a shared meal prepared with care and full of stories.

Saara’s love for the power of cooking comes from watching how her father and grandmother cook Persian dishes, like ghormeh sabzi and khoresht e bademjoon. These are simple recipes in that they have minimal ingredients. But like many foods from communities of color, they are a labor of love, and are symbols of resistance with stories of their own, and help create the space for storytelling to take place. Saara believes that we honor our ancestors by passing down recipes and their respective stories and this truth has guided so much of her approach to the work of liberation.

Saara loves testing recipes at home! Pictured here making shirin polo or jeweled rice

Feasts of Liberation is Saara’s vision for the intersection of when good work and good food come together to sustainably combat the daily realities and impacts of layers of systemic oppressions. When we nourish our minds with this kind of rigorous, reflective thinking, we should also nourish our bodies with the same intentionality. That vision is guided by these

CORE values:

• Humility

• Love

• Curiosity

• Growth

• Healing

• Justice