Elizabeth Sarmiento is a native Spanish-speaker with a commitment to social justice, community building, and resource conservation. Spending her formative years in Honduras provided her with a multi-layered understanding of the cultural roots of Latin Americans in the U.S., as well as an appreciation of diversity. As a child her experience of living close to the land, healthy streams and rivers, abundant wildlife, in the rich tropical forests of Honduras, and working in the land gave her a deep love for nature and its innate value in our lives. Her life has been an unbroken string of social justice and environmental activism ever since.

Elizabeth received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies from San José State University. She is trained and certified with Greywater Action to design and install greywater systems. She is also a certified Bay-Friendly Regional landscape designer, Santa Clara County Master Composter, Permaculture Designer, and Landscape Water Management Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) Specialist. She brings her knowledge and experience in the challenges of water supply, habitat loss, soil depletion, and energy demands resulting in climate change to design, install, and care for ecological gardens.

Elizabeth loves to teach, share and empower others with these skills while building community. Using permaculture principles, she and her team at Smart Yards Cooperative design and install gardens from the ground up: building healthy soil; working mainly with California native plants; planting food forests; utilizing reusable materials; building dry-stacked stone works; installing greywater, rainwater, drip irrigation water wise systems. Education in the cooperative business model completes the cycle of empowerment. Hence, Smart Yards Education emerged as the non-profit that teaches the mentioned principles while inspiring and getting the community excited about connecting with nature and living green in their own outdoor spaces.