Sara Chester

Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director | The Industrial Commons

Sara is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director for The Industrial Commons. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she returned to her hometown of Morganton, NC. She worked for eight years at Burke Development, Inc., Burke County’s economic development agency, focusing much of this time on place-based initiatives that grow local wealth. There she earned an IEDC award for Innovative Economic Development. Sara was honored to serve as a 2022–2023 Aspen Job Quality Fellow. She serves on the Burke County Planning Board and is the Vice Chair for the Board of Directors for the North Carolina Rural Center. Sara and her husband Josh are raising two kind and wild kids, Maggie and Lincoln.