About Us

Work With Nature, Not Against It

At Smart Yards Cooperative, we landscape with:
- Regenerative, and permaculture design methods.
- California native and drought-tolerant plants and ground covers that are children and pet friendly.
- Organic and reusable materials.
- Greywater (laundry, showers / baths tubs, and shower sinks) design and installation systems.
- Mediterranean, Woodland, Contemporary, California Coastal, Zen or Rainwater gardens.
- Food forests, fruit trees, herbs and vegetable gardens.
- Amenities such as pergolas, play yards, patios, chicken coops, fruit trees, composting systems and spaces for fun and relaxation.

Valley Water Landscape Rebate Program

As part of our job and commitment to water optimization and nature conservation, we work closely with Santa Clara Valley Water District, assisting our clients who convert their lawns to enroll in the Landscape Rebate Program. This encourages homeowners to convert approved high-water-use landscapes, such as lawns and pools, to water wise landscapes, as well as to switch existing irrigation systems to approved high-efficiency irrigation systems.

We support our clients with the whole process and guide them to select the materials and plants that are required for program eligibility. When getting approved for this rebate, homeowners get reimbursed $2 per square feet, up to $3,000 for residential sites.

Elizabeth Sarmiento has a deep love for nature and its innate value in our lives. Originally from Honduras, she has a degree in Environmental Studies and a strong commitment to conservation. She is trained and certified with Greywater Action to design and install greywater systems.  She is 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, lost habitat, soil depletion and energy demands to design, install and maintain ecological gardens and empower others with this understanding. Using ecological principles she installs native and drought-tolerant plants, drip and greywater irrigation system, rainwater systems, pervious paving, and reusable materials.

Aurelio Ilario is a team member with passion and love for nature. A team player, hard, strong and with a can do attitude, Aurelio is a key member of our team long term. Besides experience in all aspects of our work, Aurelio is a stone mason who can build any of our dry laid stacked stone. Growing up in a small town of Mexico, he learned early in his life to work with nature and the importance of conservation. With this understanding he carries on the mission of Smart Yards Co-op and our partners.

Richard Hobbs is a human rights attorney and founding Director of Human Agenda, a human rights organization based in San Jose, CA.  Human Agenda focuses on vision, cooperatives, immigrants, constitutional and human rights, and the solidarity economy.   An immigration attorney, Richard has MA degrees from the University of Mexico in Mexico City (UNAM) and San Jose State University (SJSU) and a Juris Doctor from Golden Gate University.  He served as the Director of the Office of Human Relations of Santa Clara County and also was an elected trustee for 16 years for the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District. 

 Lucas Ramirez serves on the City of Mountain View Human Relations Commission. He is an active member of both the Mountain View Coalition for Sustainable Planning and the Los Altos-Mountain View League of Women Voters (LAMV-LWV). He participates in the LAMV-LWV Housing Committee, which advocates for policies promoting affordable housing, and he also observes the Mountain View City Council as part of a team of local LWV members that promotes good and transparent government by submitting regular reports to the local League newsletter. Lucas graduated from Santa Clara University in 2011 with a degree in music.

Derek Tennant spent 9 years as a volunteer firefighter with the City of Santa Clara. He is a trained facilitator of the *Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream* Symposium offered through the Pachamama Alliance. He presents a workshop that focuses on how we, as neighbors, can better prepare and respond to the inevitable local disaster, be it made by nature or by humans.  He helped organize the 2013 *March to Heal the Valley* and the United States Social Forum in June 2015 in San Jose, where he presented a People’s Movement Assembly on conscious consumption.

Lorna Jones recently received a PhD in human geography focused on diaspora entrepreneurship, to understand how businesses succeed and how entrepreneurs reach their goals.  She believes that cooperatives offer a valuable mechanism for communities to live, work and be sustainable in a non-exploitative manner.   With a sales background in IT products, she was also the Assistant Marketing Manager at Eastridge Mall in San Jose.  She has startup experience with a US company in Paris, France and was a founding member of a community horticultural and educational project in West London, which collectively farmed and sold agricultural products.

Jayant Mehta holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Post Graduate Diploma in Entrepreneurial Management. He joined AMD as a Technology Development Engineer in 1980 and then moved to become a Marketing Engineer in 1986.  As a Technology Engineer he was part of the team that developed the process for 2-layer and 3-layer semiconductors and designed testing procedures to identify manufacturing process changes. In marketing he was responsible for trainings and the presentation of products to customers and sales reps across the country.  In 1989 he started a Rep Company and has been managing Electronic Components Distribution and Sales for the last 25 years.  In 2012 he started a Solar Design and Installation company doing residential and commercial solar projects.

Susan Harman has been an activist for justice for most of her life. She works for Commonomics USA. Susan is a member of Strike Debt Bay Area, Civilize the Cops, the Bay Area Civil Liberties Coalition, Code Pink, and the Oakland Privacy Working Group. She lives in Oakland. In June 2014, she visited the Mondragon Cooperatives Corporation.

Rev. Chuck Rawlings is a retired Presbyterian minister who worked for many years in the civil rights movement in Cleveland.  The deindustrialization that destroyed manufacturing in the mid-west led him to help lead community and worker ownership projects, including the effort to create worker-owned steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio.  He is a former executive of the Santa Clara Council of Churches and the New Jersey Council of Churches  and also served as coordinator of urban programs at the National Council of Churches.  In New Jersey he led a United Nations Association project with Rutgers University and the National Science Foundation to document the downward pressure on wages and benefits of globalization in the Port of New Jersey and New York.

Karita Hummer, LCSW, is President and Clinical Director for FACTR (Family Alliance for Counseling Tools and Resolution), a multicultural service, research and training non-profit. Formerly Clinical Director of the Eastern European Service Agency (EESA), she is a child psychotherapist, refugee mental health specialist, and expert in childhood trauma, separation, loss, and high-conflict divorce. In addition to her 50 years of experience in the field of mental health, she has extensive experience with the design of micro-enterprise models for refugees and immigrants. She is experienced in lecturing, training and supervising mental health clinicians and interns.

Gerald Hunt is a retired CPA with 4 years of Big 6 experience auditing newspapers, franchise operations, Great Lakes shipping operations, steel and titanium foundry and rolling operations, steel and gold mining operations, and electronics manufacturing. In electronics manufacturing he worked in fiber optic, semiconductor, circuit board, component, and computer assembly plants including installing or upgrading data tracking methodologies. He utilized process and job order costing including the collection of manufacturing data in order to initially establish standard costing as well as to update existing standards.  He used flow analysis to identify and quantify variances created during flows to ascertain the consistency and accuracy of the flow.