Cara Honzak for Takoma Park Ward 5

Overview

I am humbled to have served as the Takoma Park City Councilmember for Ward 5 since 2022. It has been my privilege and honor to dedicate myself to ensuring that our whole City and Ward 5 are the places where we can all live, work, play and thrive. I continue to be deeply committed to the well-being of my ward neighbors, in all of our multi-layered ethnic and cultural diversity. I seek to listen, learn and collaborate to build solutions that are win-win across our entire ward and beyond. I bring to the candidacy my 20+ years of professional experience in participatory community building as an advocate and international health, gender, and climate specialist, often in Spanish-speaking countries. My husband and I have been Ward 5 residents for 20+ years, first as renters and then as homeowners in 2005. Our three children attend MCPS schools (high school, middle and elementary), and our oldest attended the Takoma Park Cooperative Nursery School here in our ward. My wonderful experiences in our neighborhood motivate me to do all in my power to ensure the representation of every individual who lives in our community.

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About Cara

• Cara has served as the Takoma Park City Councilmember for Ward 5 since November 2022.
• Cara is deeply invested in Ward 5 and Takoma Park. She has been a resident of Ward 5 Takoma Park for more than 20 years. She and her husband Miro first rented a basement apartment in a multi-family unit on Greenwood Ave., and then 17 years ago, bought a home on Kennebec Ave.
• Cara and Miro have three school-aged children who have grown up in Ward 5 and attended MCPS schools and local preschools. Cara has worked tirelessly to nurture a supportive community for youth - as a soccer and Girls-on-the-Run coach, an instigator of the Move More Sit Less campaign at Takoma Park Elementary School (that more than 10 years later is still helping kids across the school move more while learning), a PTA member, and a Girl Scout leader.
• She is ready to put her professional acumen to work for Ward 5. Her career as an advocate, activist and analyst is built on her specialization in building complex partnerships at multiple scales (community level up to international) and across sectors that did not always want to cooperate—namely health and conservation.
• Working for about a decade respectively at World Wildlife Fund and Pathfinder International as a Senior Advisor, she is recognized for her pioneering work in bringing essential services- including water and sanitation, healthcare, improved livelihoods, and rights to govern natural resources- to some of the most marginalized and hard-to-reach communities on earth- especially across Africa and Asia.
• She is highly experienced in municipal government engagement. Her profession regularly involved leading participatory community engagement, advocating city governments to cooperate laterally, vertically and with the public and private sectors to innovate, use scarce funds efficiently to deliver essential services, like healthcare and supplies, and enforce government policies on natural resources.
• She is multi-lingual and ready to put her Spanish to work to promote increased voter engagement and service provision, as 27 percent of Ward 5 identifies as Hispanic. She is also actively looking for members of other linguistic communities to augment her volunteer team.
• Her educational background gives her the policy expertise and critical analytical skills that our City Council and Ward 5 needs. She has a Masters’ in Public Affairs (which is sometimes called an “MBA for the Public Sector”) from the University of Texas, and a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies and Economics from Columbia University in New York.
• Although she spent the first 17 years of her life in Houston, Texas, her formative years in New York, her more than two decades of experience working and living abroad, and her two decades in Takoma Park have shaped her view that a healthy, thriving, vibrant community is one in which diverse people not only live side by side, but also share public and private spaces, friendships and community, and quality services in equal measure.

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Endorsements

• To Be Determined

Authorized by Cara Honzak
Paid for by the Cara for Takoma Campaign