Princess Sarah Culberson

Why organisations work with Sarah Culberson

• A first-person story that does the work belonging-themed talks usually fail at: foster care, transracial adoption, and the discovery at 28 that her father was a Mende prince in Sierra Leone. Audiences disengage from abstract DEI framing; this is concrete.
• Co-author of A Princess Found (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), in development as a Disney live-action film with producer Stephanie Allain. The story has cultural reach beyond the corporate room.
• President and co-founder of Sierra Leone Rising, an operating nonprofit running water, sanitation, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. Allyship is something she builds, not theorises.
• Recipient of the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards (2022), with sustained media coverage on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times.
• Pairs the inspirational keynote with practical content on assumptions, uncomfortable conversations and inclusive team-building, drawn from over 15 years presenting in schools, universities and corporations.

Biography highlights

• Co-author, A Princess Found: An American Family, an African Chiefdom, and the Daughter Who Connected Them All (St. Martin’s Press, 2009)
• President and co-founder, Sierra Leone Rising (founded 2006, formerly the Kposowa Foundation)
• Mahaloi (granddaughter of the Paramount Chief) of the Bumpe-Gao Chiefdom, Sierra Leone
• Disney development deal (2019) for a live-action film adaptation of her memoir, with Stephanie Allain as producer
• Impact Award, Bounce TV 30th Trumpet Awards (2022)
• BFA, West Virginia University; MFA, American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco
• Featured on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC, NPR, The New York Times, People and Newsweek

Biography

In 2004, an adopted theatre student in San Francisco hired a private investigator to trace her birth family. The trail led from West Virginia to a chiefdom in Sierra Leone still recovering from a brutal civil war. Sarah Culberson’s father was a Mende prince. Her grandfather had been Paramount Chief. The discovery rewrote her sense of identity and gave her a public platform she has been working with ever since.

That platform produced a memoir, A Princess Found, co-written with Tracy Trivas and published by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Disney signed a development deal in 2019 to adapt the book into a live-action film, with Stephanie Allain producing and Culberson serving as executive producer. The story has been covered on CNN, Good Morning America, BBC and The New York Times.

The substantive work, though, sits inside Sierra Leone Rising, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2006. It runs sanitation, clean water, education and coding programmes in the Bumpe Chiefdom. The nonprofit is what gives her belonging keynote its weight. She is not asking organisations to consider allyship as a concept; she has spent two decades building it across two cultures.

For corporate audiences she translates that experience into the practical content of belonging: how assumptions form, how uncomfortable conversations are conducted, how cross-cultural teams move past politeness into trust. In 2022 she received the Impact Award at Bounce TV’s 30th Trumpet Awards, recognition for a body of work that joins a personal story to operating institutions on two continents.

Key speaking topics

• Belonging and allyship in the workplace
• Cross-cultural identity and biracial experience
• Inclusive team-building
• Diversity, equity and inclusion
• Personal transformation and purpose
• Humanitarian leadership and social impact

Ideal for

• CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads commissioning belonging or inclusion programmes
• Employee resource groups and women’s leadership networks
• Annual company conferences and kick-offs seeking an inspirational anchor with substantive content
• Education and nonprofit sector audiences working on equity and social impact

Audience outcomes

• A vivid, memorable narrative that grounds inclusion conversations in lived experience rather than policy language
• A working vocabulary for assumptions, allyship and cross-cultural difference inside teams
• Concrete examples of how a Western-educated outsider built trust and impact in a post-conflict community in Sierra Leone
• Renewed commitment to belonging as a daily leadership practice, not a programme