Sandra McGarraugh

Biographical Sketch

Sandra McGarraugh is currently serving her second term as Chair of the Women Work!
Board of Directors. She has been a member of Women Work! since 1983 and has held a variety of leadership positions at the state, regional and national level. She was elected in 2000 to serve as Region II Representative to the National Governing Board. In that capacity she was instrumental in the development of the Women Work! Diversity workshop, and chaired the team that developed Leadership Works!.

In her day job she is the Program Director of the Center for Innovation in Career Development, University at Albany, New York, where she works with various education, business and community representatives to develop career information and exploration activities and resources. She oversees the Nontraditional Employment and Training (NET) Project, a statewide technical assistance center for secondary and postsecondary CTE programs that supports gender equity and nontraditional career options.

McGarraugh has more than 25 years of experience in training, group facilitation and program development. She specializes in designing training curricula, and had produced turnkey training models in a variety of areas. She developed the Career Challenge, a 5-day workshop for workers-in-transition that uses experiential activities to teach communication, team building and other skills. In 1990 she researched and published Roles in Conflict: Women Preparing for Technical Careers, which provided a model for efforts to help low-income women achieve economic self-sufficiency through high wage employment.

She is also the president of Thalia Associates, Inc., a private training and consulting firm that provides a variety of staff and program development services as well as community and organizational interventions. McGarraugh earned an M.L.S. from SUNY Buffalo and an M.A. in Community Psychology from Russell Sage College.