Sharan Kaur Bal and Robert Hertz Friedman are to be married Sept. 2. Rabbi Edward Schecter is to officiate at Stone Tavern Farm, an events space in Roxbury, N.Y. On Sept. 1, the couple had a traditional Sikh ceremony at the same location.
Ms. Bal, 31, is a partner in the Ready, an organizational design consulting firm in New York. She graduated from McGill University.
She is the daughter of Surinder K. Bal and Permjit S. Bal of Sandy Springs, Ga. The bride’s father retired as a regional chief information officer, in Atlanta, for Coca-Cola. Her mother is a mental-health counselor in Alpharetta, Ga.
Mr. Friedman, 29, is an environmental justice policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is in New York. He graduated from Bates College and received a certificate in organizational coaching from the Academy for Coaching Excellence in Sacramento.
He is a son of Michele L. Hertz and Lawrence B. Friedman of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The groom’s mother is the president of the New York Safe Utility Meter Association, an organization in Woodstock, N.Y., that works for the return to mechanical utility meters and works to educate the public on the health, safety and security issues raised by wireless meters. His father is the general counsel at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, the New York law firm, from which he retired as a partner.
The couple met in 2012 at a weeklong training session in New York of StartingBloc, a leadership development organization in Raleigh, N.C. Ms. Bal is now a director of the organization.
“She gave a pitch to the room, and I was smitten right off the bat,” Mr. Friedman said. “The confidence with which she spoke, the story she shared of recently moving from Hong Kong to New York, the work was inspiring, focused on making supply chains more sustainable in Asia. She’s also beautiful, so that started off a friendship that lasted for about a year.”
Ms. Bal, too, was quickly interested. The two went out to a bar with a small group of people from the training session, and they quickly fell into conversation. “I thought he was really interesting and engaging and smart,” she said.
Over the next few months, they kept bumping into each other at events, including a public forum on Superstorm Sandy and several dance parties.
“There was a period of time when it was pretty random that we would see each other,” he said. “We would just run into each other. Then we started making plans and hanging out.”
Ms. Bal said that when Mr. Friedman went on a road trip across the country, and then worked in Peru for a time, she began seeing him in a different light. “Seeing him doing things that I wasn’t a part of, I started realizing I had feelings for him,” she said.
“He is incredibly deep and intentional, very wise for his years but always looking to improve himself and be a better person,” she said. “He has such an inspiring vision for the world, and he sees our relationship as a way to work toward that vision.”
A little over a year after they had first met, in September 2013, he was single and she was single. She pushed for the two of them to go out together. They had dinner at a ramen place, and then made their way back to his apartment building.
Mr. Friedman, who had also been wondering how their friendship hadn’t flowed naturally into a romance, didn’t let the moment get away.
“We were on the rooftop overlooking the city,” he said, “and I made a move.”
