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Sarah Brown Treasurer, Office of Financial Services Saint Paul, Minnesota

A Career Highlight

One of the biggest highlights for me was being appointed to one of GFOA’s national committees early in my career. People on those committees are typically managers and directors, so being appointed when I was still a treasury analyst was a big step.

A Challenging Start to a New Beginning

When I became treasurer of St. Paul, we were dealing with a lot of turnover. As a new manager, I was more familiar with the debt side of things rather than the cash side, which made it exceptionally challenging to bring on new staff, backfill my old position, and train them in a field that I wasn’t as comfortable with. The other thing I inherited was a bit of a financial backlog. I’m happy to announce that we’re only about a month and a half behind now. I’m definitely beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Importance of Mentors

My “mentor for life” is a former boss who brought me into public finance, and to this day, I call her all the time. It’s good to have someone who can give you both professional advice and life advice. There were times when, as a woman of color, I was really looking for somebody who looked like me and had walked in my shoes, so I reached out to a woman in San Diego who luckily took my phone call. She was able to answer a lot of my questions about public finance and just being a woman of color in the field as well.

ICMA and GFOA

I really value the partnership between ICMA and GFOA. Both organizations have been an extreme value add for my professional career. I’m a fellow in the 2022–2023 class of ICMA’s Leadership Institute on Race, Equity, and Inclusion, but I wouldn’t even be a part of it had GFOA not alerted me to the opportunity.