Your NameSara "Smmo" Ozawa
Email Addressozawa23@csld.edu
Cohort AssignmentHybrid In-Person/Online with Intensive in Santa Fe, Winter-Spring 2025
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

At a personal scale, my primary work is to be a good neighbor, and to hold space for family and friends that offers clarity, affirmation, and support for them to grow more fully into themselves. More and more so, my own growth provides a trellis for those around me.

On teams, my work is to absorb multiple factors and provide vision and structure to achieve desired outcomes. An example might be developing an organizational system that strikes the right balance of adaptable and structured so as to be intuitive for all team members to use reliably.

In my greater contribution, my primary work is to reorient the realm of planning around developing informed populi who can effectively co-design their communities that embody the values of socially connectivity; creativity, health, and joy; and ecologically resilience + regeneration.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

I see myself as an observer, listener, translator, facilitator, envisioner, alchemist, advocate, and empath. I love the puzzle of the complexities of it all, and finding patterns and win-win-wins within the multitudes. I seek to spread more comfort in the complexity so we may more effectively develop strategies and actions collectively.

I suppose to sum it up in an earthy metaphor, I am akin to a composter... breaking down a variety of material to create fertile soil for a community to sprout and thrive.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

I'd like to be able to create a community space and/or program to encourage civic dialogue and education around how change happens at a local level.
I'd like to develop plans for towns and community organizations that shift perceptions around what plans can and should be. That effectively shift away from the typically planning paradigms that so often fall short of community and ecological needs.

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

I've been enjoying my evolution into a more composed, calm, balanced version of myself. I would like to continue growing that capacity, and to provide even better space for others in the work I do.

5. And for professional growth?

I love the multitudes... and would also love more tools to reliably utilize for understanding the complexities.

I would like to develop a toolkit that will help me feel more confident stepping into the "project design" and "project management" realms.

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

I have learned the hard way, in contexts that felt like trying to set roots in an altogether inhospitable landscape. I have had to become extremely attuned to myself, having had chronic illness and pain for over half my life. My journey has been nonlinear and unconventional and wonderfully my own. It has required developing robust support networks. It has required much time and energy and ultimately, confidence in my capabilities. I have monetarily invested in my curiosities by returning to grad school and as I've started my own business.

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

I am a student of Paul Glover, Jane Jacobs, Murray Bookchin, Grace Lee Boggs, Masanobu Fukuoka, the Combahee Collective and intersectional feminism, biotecture, a pattern language, socioecology, social permaculture, a community of queer and BIPOC land stewards, the Just Transition, my ancestors, and of the land.

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

Ooh. I feel like I have many.... but to be concise, I think life gravitates toward abundance and diversity. Humans can play a role to encourage or obstruct this outcome. The universe is ultimately apathetic, and it is upon humans to choose to create the conditions for care and compassion in our species' lived experience.

Date CreatedFebruary 4, 2025