meet sally
Hi, I’m Sally Duncan and I’d love to tell you why I want to be your Albemarle County Supervisor for the Jack Jouett District.
When I moved to Albemarle County 10 years ago, I immediately felt at home. I found my community in the church, in the university, and in the streets. In my time living here, I’ve seen community members and friends courageously stand up to hate, create advocacy groups, start unions, and run for office – all of them working in their own way to create a better community for each of us.
I know the power local government has to create the kind of community that people want to live in. I know that the issues I care about, other people also care about. We all want schools with a supported and happy staff. Great parks and more recreational opportunities. Faster and reliable public transit. And of course, maybe the most pressing issue, more housing of all kinds. We have the resources to create the kind of community we all want to live in.
I am not a politician. But I am a mother of 5 teenagers and young adults. I am an adult who went back to college while raising teenagers. I am a high school teacher who teaches history, writing, and thinking. I’m a person who loves digging into issues and finding not only the answers, but also the reasons why.
I believe that people with my experiences and skill set should be participating in the decisions that so profoundly shape our lives, and that is why I would love to be your Albemarle County Supervisor for the Jack Jouett District.
my story
I grew up in southwestern Michigan, 30 miles from where my ancestors settled on Potawatomi land, just as Michigan was becoming a state. I know what it is to be rooted to a place and to want the stories and the land preserved. When my grandparents died, their farm was broken up, and a house was built at the top of the hill I used to spend winters sledding down. Before moving to Virginia in 2013, I visited the various cemeteries where my grand, and great, and great-great grandparents were buried, discovering even more family history at the same time that I was saying goodbye to the place that was so deeply *home*.
I have always loved history – the story of people and places and interesting events. In hindsight, it seems logical that I would have ended up here, of all places, in a space so rich with history and such a deep and complicated connection to the land, and to the policies that affect the people living on the land.
For a long time, I had a “Little House on the Prairie” type of vibe for my life, and so I gardened, stayed home, and homeschooled my kids. Eventually I realized that one, that kind of life was really hard and pretty isolating, and two, it wasn’t serving us well anymore. We all wanted to be a part of a bigger community.
So, not too long after we moved here, I put my kids into ACPS (Broadus Wood, Jouett/Journey, and AHS) and I went back to school as a student myself, trying to blend in with the 20 year-olds. I graduated from PVCC in 2018, and from UVA in 2020 with a degree in American Studies. I stayed at UVA to get my Master’s Degree in American Religions, with a certificate in American Studies in 2023, where I studied the intersection of pop culture and white christian nationalism. I served on Charlottesville’s Historic Resources Committee for 4 years, and I have been a high school teacher at an independent school in Charlottesville since 2021, where I teach various history classes along with the junior and senior independent studies courses.
My kids have done just as well in the nearly 10 years we have lived in Albemarle County. My oldest is 24 and works in the wedding industry in Richmond, while my 22 year-old graduated from AHS and now works for an engineering firm in Blacksburg. I still have three kids at home who attend Albemarle High School – a senior, junior, and a sophomore, and they are student athletes, participate in the orchestra and student government, and more often than not, our basement is filled with teenagers who are reminders that we are not just working towards a sustainable future for ourselves, but also for all of them. In addition to all of this, I have been married for 23 years to a civil engineer who also understands the importance of local government.
