Our Leadership Team

As President and CEO of Sequoia Living, Sara McVey brings 20+ years’ experience in global marketing and strategy accentuated by a strong penchant for senior living in both for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.

Sara’s first senior living stint was with Classic Residence by Hyatt (Vi), where she was an Assistant Vice President responsible for managing marketing and advertising efforts across the country. Sara then went on to spend more than a decade with Mather LifeWays in a series of escalating executive roles, including Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, and Vice President and Experience Director of The Mather, a Life Plan Community that opened in 2009 in Evanston, Illinois. Soon, the West Coast was calling, and she moved to Seattle to join Horizon House as their CEO in 2015. In 2019, Sara relocated to San Francisco to serve as Sequoia Living’s President and CEO.

Sara started her career in Advertising as a writer and quickly moved into pitching new business and client relations. She served as Vice President of Account Services for a national advertising firm in Chicago, Illinois, working with Fortune 500 companies. She took a brief detour and lived in Scotland where she held the position of International Director of Sales and Marketing for Carnegie Clubs. Her impressionable years were spent in Wisconsin working at Dairy Queen and Enterprise Rent-A-Car—which may be contributing factors to her current aversion to car ownership and lactose.

With a BA in Marketing/Mass Communication and Health Education from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and an MBA from the University of Chicago she fancies herself a perpetual student. Sara speaks nationally (and sometimes to herself) on leadership, culture, and innovation. She is a yoga enthusiast and an avid reader of books on self-improvement—living by the motto that you can always be a slightly better version than who you were yesterday.