People We Love

Among the things we love most about Arizona are the people. Around the state, ordinary people are doing extraordinary things. Here are just 10 of them — people doing interesting and innovative work that’s making a difference in their communities. Without exception, they resist taking credit, insisting that their accomplishments result from the work of many hands. And while that’s true, it’s also true that these 10 people have the kind of vision that makes others want to get behind their plans and ideas. They are leaders who inspire us to make Arizona a better place.
 

SHAWN BOMAR,
FIRE WISE
During the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, Shawn Bomar watched an incident management team take over the elementary school in Peeples Valley. The effort was efficient and organized, and when the team left, not one Gatorade bottle remained.

Bomar was impressed. At the time, he was serving on the community’s fire board, and what he saw during the fire convinced him the community was unprepared. He quit the board, earned a degree in fire science and got field experience with a neighboring department. And although he resisted appeals to assume management of the Peeples Valley Fire District, he finally agreed
in 2019.

Bomar brought in paid staff, fixed up the department’s sleeping quarters and staffed the station 24/7, cutting response time in half. He added equipment, created a wildland division and applied for grants funding fuels reduction in strategic areas. He also got a grant to fund coordinators in surrounding communities that later earned Firewise USA certifications from the National Fire Protection Association.

Back in 2013, Bomar also saw the need for a multi-agency facility. As chief, he got land donated and negotiated with government agencies and private companies to build the facility; at press time, the project was awaiting a final vote. Bomar still has the drawing he made of the facility years ago. “We’ll probably hang it on the wall somewhere,” he says.
 

ERIN CARR-JORDAN,
SOLVING THE BIG PROBLEMS
Erin Carr-Jordan believes complex problems, such as poverty and unemployment, are solvable when you bring together the right people who are genuinely interested in working together. An educational psychologist specializing in learning, Carr-Jordan has made a career of helping at-risk people get access to something that helps them live the lives they want. Most recently, that “something” has been technology.

“We have massive technological shifts happening every single day,” Carr-Jordan says. “For folks who don’t know how or don’t have access, I can’t see a way for them to catch up.”

That’s how she landed on the Institute for Digital Inclusion Acceleration, or IDIA, which removes barriers by taking technology to people with the greatest need, then teaching them and making it fun. IDIA does that through 10 technology “hives” around the state, staffed by digital navigators who help people accomplish whatever they’re interested in, whether that’s virtual reality, 3D printing or setting up an email account. Two hives are mobile, allowing IDIA to extend its reach into communities such as Tombstone, where it anchored a school’s first-ever STEM event.

In the past two years, IDIA has served 136,000 Arizonans, including helping some 300 unemployed or underemployed people find good jobs with benefits. If you can see a better future, Carr-Jordan says, anything is possible.
 

TY FITZMORRIS,
CREATING COMMUNITY
When Ty Fitzmorris opened the Raven Café on North Cortez Street in downtown Prescott, he pictured an adjacent bookstore. Ultimately, though, he opened the bookstore on the next block — much of which was chronically unoccupied.

Fitzmorris had been talking with the U.S. Postal Service about buying the federal building across from the Yavapai County Courthouse when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. When other prospective buyers left the table, he closed the deal. Shortly afterward, several buildings on Cortez came up for sale, and Fitzmorris used rents from the federal building to buy them.

He partnered with Newt Lynn, who has a degree in historic preservation, to restore the old buildings, peeling away stucco, dropped ceilings and fluorescent lights. Addressing what he saw as a lack of businesses oriented toward kids and young parents, Fitzmorris began offering space to young entrepreneurs at affordable rents.

The rebranded NoCo district is now home to a music store, a toy store, an arts collective, a community kitchen, a social club and two theater companies. In the next phase, Fitzmorris plans to add green space, beginning with a pocket park next to the Raven.

“There’s a monumental amount of work left to do,” he says. “What makes it exciting is how the community steps in and gets involved.”
 

MANNY GUZMAN,
REBUILDING SUPERIOR
Despite deep roots in Superior — seven generations on his dad’s side, five on his mom’s — Manny Guzman’s family relocated to Oklahoma when the Magma Copper Co. closed local mining operations in the 1980s. They returned a few years later to a town in decline.

After high school, Guzman left home to attend the University of Arizona and settled there, though he remained involved in the community. “This is home,” he says. Then, in 2018, Superior’s mayor asked him to join the board of the recently organized Rebuild Superior. The town’s biggest issue was capital, and the new nonprofit would allow the community to apply for grants.

Guzman returned home to serve as the organization’s first executive director. A religious studies major, he didn’t have economic development expertise. But community and economic development is largely about relationship building, he says, and “I know how to do that.”

Early on, the organization painted buildings and murals. It took over the struggling food bank that Guzman’s grandmother had helped establish. And it opened the Superior Enterprise Center, which offers skills training and business support. The center’s welding program has been very successful, and so has a marketing partnership with the local Chamber of Commerce and nearby Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

Today, the food bank is winning awards and the community is growing for the first time in 40 years, Guzman says. “We’re in a different era,” he adds, “and it’s an exciting one.”
 

J.D. HILL,
BRINGING FOOD FROM TABLE TO FARM
J.D. Hill wanted to be a small farmer but was advised against it. So, when he heard about a business model popping up around the country, he was intrigued. The idea was to give customers a 5-gallon bucket for their food waste and collect it regularly. Hill’s take on that idea was to sell customers vegetables that had been grown with the help of their composted food. Who wouldn’t want to buy those?

He began collecting buckets around dumpsters and signing up customers at a farmers market. Making pickups in a truck with no air conditioning and a sticking door, he washed buckets on-site — because he didn’t have enough of them to swap out — and fermented waste in his backyard.

Today, the business, Recycled City, has grown to serve 6,500 residential and 200 business clients. On farmland he and a partner recently bought in Florence, Hill supports a small, independent farmer by supplying the infrastructure and buying the produce. With a vegetable subscription, Recycled City Collects food scraps for free, or customers pay a modest fee.

“Forty percent of what we grow isn’t eaten, and 95 percent of it goes to the landfill or incinerator,” he says. “Why don’t we do this?”

BRAD LANCASTER,
PLANTING THE RAIN
A permaculture class got Brad Lancaster thinking about water harvesting. He saw how these practices restored dying rivers and recharged aquifers in other countries, and he recalls asking, “Why aren’t we doing this?”

His local solution seemed counterintuitive: Plant more trees. But neighbors in Lancaster’s Central Tucson neighborhood worried about watering them. “We’ll plant the rain before we plant any tree,” he told them. And instead of replanting exotic species that had failed, they’d copy the plant palette of the desert.

Residents initially planted 200 trees in rainwater capture basins, and they cut curbs — which was illegal at the time — to collect storm runoff, which also controlled flooding. This year, the neighborhood completed its 30th annual planting, which has evolved to include understory plants. That effort has dramatically lowered temperatures. Native birds and wildlife have returned, and neighbors now know one another.

Lancaster’s “little guerilla pilot project” inspired change citywide. Curb cutting is now legal in Tucson and mandated in new road construction, Lancaster says. Tree suppliers now offer native trees, and the idea has spread to a neighboring community.

“All you need to start is two people, one shovel and one tree,” Lancaster says. “As people see that and get excited, it can grow.”
 

WENDI LEWIS,
GOING THE DISTANCE
Running is an important part of Hopi culture — and Wendi Lewis’ life. Several years ago, the three-time Hopi High School state champion started the running apparel brand Hohongvit, or “Strong Ones.” The idea was to give Hopi runners something symbolic of their culture that they could wear when competing — and that other Hopis could recognize and get excited about. “I ultimately created that brand to raise money to help runners get to where they needed to be,” Lewis says. “The company always brought in just enough money to help me help people.”

More recently, Lewis founded the Hopi Distance Project, a community development nonprofit with a focus on public health. Through partnerships with companies such as Asics, the organization has provided high-quality running shoes to students at five tribal schools. It also hosts a women’s running retreat focused on Hopi culture, and it’s a sponsor of The Marathon Project, which gives runners the chance to meet elite athletes.

“If things don’t work out competitively,” Lewis says, “there’s still so many ways we can be connected to running.” Her ultimate dream, though, is to help a Native runner get to the Summer Olympics. “That’s the goal,” she says.
 

JEANNETTE MARÉ,
SPREADING KINDNESS
Everything changed for Jeanette Maré after her son Ben died, and in her grief, she understood kindness differently. “People showed up for my family in so many ways,” she recalls. “I was saved by that kindness.”

Her family had opened a paint-it-yourself pottery studio in Tucson, and Maré found comfort in working with clay; at the same time, an artist in Oregon was leaving blown-glass objects in public places for people to find. The two elements came together in Maré’s mind, and she and a group of friends created 400 ceramic wind chimes and distributed them around Tucson, along with a reminder to be kind, on the anniversary of Ben’s death.

Maré found the experience cathartic, and Ben’s Bells was born. The organization opened studios and kindness camps, created “Be Kind” stickers and community murals, and offered kindness programs for schools and workplaces.

After 17 years at Ben’s Bells, Maré left the organization to earn a doctorate. She’s now an assistant research professor at the University of Arizona, where she studies kindness and how to create the conditions for it. “We’ve got to keep talking about this,” she says, “because when we don’t, we believe all the things we’re hearing about how we all hate each other, which is not the case at all.”
 

ROBERTO NUTLOUIS,
TAPPING INTO ANCIENT WISDOM
Roberto Nutlouis began community organizing around climate justice as an Indigenous studies student at Northern Arizona University. And when Navajo leaders asked, “What’s the solution?” he found a potential answer in agroecology.

“The definition that I’ve landed with is a food system that is synchronized with the local ecological processes,” he says. “And that’s what my people [historically] had.”

Nutlouis established his own farm at age 16 on an alluvial fan, where water flows from the hills, depositing sediment and creating fertile soil. In college, he interviewed farmers all over the Navajo Nation and began experimenting with their methods, using drought-tolerant heirloom seeds and creating permeable brush dams and berms to capture seasonal runoff and reduce erosion.

As executive director of Nihikeya, Nutlouis works to educate tribal leaders and communities in the Black Mesa region about these ancient techniques. He does so by bringing in speakers, hosting workshops on traditional food making and distributing food — a holistic approach he believes is one way to address issues of food insecurity and culture loss.

“The knowledge and wisdom of our people is ancient and time-tested,” he says. “If we’re going to live and thrive on our homelands, we really need to look to ancestral wisdom.”
 

OLIVIA WOODS,
BLAZING TRAILS
Olivia Woods decided she wanted to work outdoors after a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. She started volunteering with the Arizona Trail Association, and it wasn’t long before she took a job with the organization, coordinating work for groups of volunteers.

Taking courses on sustainable trail work eventually led to her current job building trails for Flagline Trails, which does a lot of work on the Arizona Trail. A certified sawyer, Woods travels all over the state, camping for eight days at a time and working on trails from the North Rim to the Santa Rita Mountains.

The work is important, she says, because it creates space for people to experience the outdoors safely while protecting the environment. “The trail is a little sacrificial space that we disturb so that more of it is protected,” she says.

Woods still volunteers for the ATA, serving as a trail steward for a stretch in the Superstition Mountains. She loves the work and wants to see it promoted as a career option. “Not all kids want to grow up and be a doctor or a lawyer,” she says. “When I was in high school, I knew nothing about any of this.”