Vivian Smotherman

Vivian first came to Colorado with her parents in the middle of the 1970s. Here her family settled and as she grew older, she developed a deep love for the people, the culture, and the beauty of Colorado. Later, after leaving school, Vivian pursued her second great passion, sailing, by joining the United States Navy and serving honorably through the First Gulf War. After leaving the Navy Vivian had a successful career in the communications industry as the world shifted from pagers to cell phones, but the sea still called, and before long she found her way into the offshore oil and gas industry where she quickly rose through the ranks to Equipment Superintendent, a roll very few women manage to achieve. Throughout her twenty-year career, Vivian traveled all over the world and worked with people from a variety of cultures. Here she polished her leadership skills by learning to respect and incorporate the various strengths that people from diverse cultures could bring to her team. As a leader, Vivian’s focus has always been on her people, keeping them safe, raising their skills and confidence, and striving to make sure they earned enough to keep them happy and committed to her team. During these twenty years, Vivian, and her wife JoAnn, managed to purchase, build, and operate one of the most successful small-scale, rare-breed, hog farms in all of Texas. This exposure to the difficulties of small-scale farming in the modern world prompted Vivian to form the Farm-1-1 project, a 501-3c non-profit organization committed to helping people with dreams of farming, make better decisions by teaching them effective and efficient ways to get started without sinking themselves into inescapable debt. As part of the program, Vivian used her technical and interpersonal skills to build a network of farmers who were willing to share equipment and support new farmers through their early efforts. She also worked at the local community college where she and her wife taught classes for beginning farmers on everything from setting up their business to buying land and equipment, including how to maintain and repair tractors. Working abroad during the pandemic, facing months of isolation and quarantine, alone in foreign countries, brought Vivian to realize she had been away from Colorado and its mountains for far too long. In 2021 She and her wife sold the hog farm in Central Texas and moved to Durango to once again walk the trails, breath the mountain air, and enjoy life in a state with four seasons. Here she retired from the offshore industry and enrolled at Fort Lewis College to finally complete an education she had started many years earlier. Today, when not in class finishing up degrees in Anthropology and History, Vivian can be found hosting trivia contests for the college History club, marching for women’s reproductive rights, and protesting Mom’s for Liberty as she fights to keep their hateful brand of extremism out of southwest Colorado, supporting the LGBT+ community through volunteer efforts when needed, and generally just being a part of her community. Vivian’s guiding principle is and has always been, give more than you take.