Sustaining community, sustaining herself
Coffee or tea: Coffee, black if it’s homemade; and cinnamon oat milk latte if it’s at a café
Song on repeat: “Lavender Boom Box” by Miniature Tigers
Favorite destination in Oregon: Natural bridges on the Southern Coast or the Columbia Gorge during a wildflower bloom.
Next destination in Oregon: Summiting a mountain in the Cascades
Next place you'd like to visit: Chile, because it's tropical and mountainous.
A year ago, Sadie Creemer knew she had to make a change.
She was working for the Holden Leadership Center to increase civic engagement and get students registered to vote. She was a leader of the UO Club Sailing Team. She had joined the UO Marching Band and had begun diving deep into pursuing her two majors along with her Clark Honors College coursework.
Creemer realized at the time that she was doing too much, always anxious about the next thing. A conversation she had with her then-boss, Hannah White, helped Creemer to consider her own well-being more.
White leveled with her student employee and gave her some life-changing advice. “She told me that I worked too hard and that I did too much and that I was too much of a busybody,” Creemer recalls. “And she was worried about my capacity and sustaining my own livelihood. That was the first time anyone had challenged what I thought was just being really motivated.”
She knew White was right, and she knew she had to slow down or she might not be able to sustain her commitments. “I wasn’t able to focus on anything in the present,” says Creemer. “I was just so focused on the anxiety about everything else I had to do.”
Creemer, now a junior, is double majoring in economics and public policy, planning and management. She works as the student engagement lead at the Student Sustainability Center and is a staunch believer in students being involved in the community. She’s a self-described extrovert who wants to make an impact on the world around her.
“We live in a world where natural disasters and emergencies are at an all-time high,” she says with a sense of urgency. “They’re inevitable, and they’re going to keep happening if we don’t do something about them.”
Her journey through college has followed a patchwork of stepping stones en route to becoming a changemaker. Along with her passion for sustainability, Creemer has spent a lot of time at the Holden Center, working on voter registration.
"I think allowing myself to do all that has allowed me to play with what I'm interested in, so I feel more confident in deciding what I want to do now that I've had a wide variety of experiences.”
Forging her path
Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Creemer has long been a “doer,” someone who always pushed the envelope. She has fond memories of her days with the Girl Scouts that started in kindergarten and ran through high school. She also served in the Boy Scouts – the moment the group became co-ed in 2019, she then became one of her troop's Eagle Scouts.
She went sailing with her dad, volunteered at summer camps, and played recreation-league soccer. She received her certification to be a referee when she was 12. By the time she was 16, her dad and brother were her assistants for some of the games.
Her grandmother was a key influence on her life. Every summer, she spent a week with her grandmother in Springfield, Missouri. Creemer remembers taking daily walks to the downtown area and back, balancing on curbs, running sticks along fences, and saying hello to everyone who recognized them.
When the pandemic hit, her grandmother made 5,000 masks to distribute to residents. “Every time there’s a need, she fills it,” Creemer says.
Creemer dreamed of coming to Oregon for as long as she can remember, thinking: “It just looks like a different planet. People are enjoying the outdoors year-round, so I have to go there.”
She focused on her schoolwork and took a full load of international baccalaureate courses. She ran cross country and played tenor saxophone in her school band.
She wasn’t sure how she’d pay for college until she received a Stamps Scholarship that covers tuition and fees for out-of-state students who attend UO. Her hard work had paid off.
When she arrived in Eugene, she tackled the place with the same energy she displayed growing up. She worked at the Holden Center in a new position created to focus on student civic and voter engagement. White says Creemer had plenty of creativity and enthusiasm, but she also saw that the student put others before herself – sometimes to her detriment.
“Sadie reminded me of myself in undergrad, ratcheted up a few notches,” White says. “She is a ‘yes’ person and wants to do it all. She’s interested in so many things. It’s great, and college is the time, but she wasn’t taking very good care of herself because she didn’t see it as a priority.”
Creemer became more critical about choosing what to take on, and tried to slow down just a bit. She started taking breaks and enjoying some of the quiet that comes with college life if you make it happen.
She recognizes that her life isn’t perfectly balanced today, but she weighs every commitment she makes more carefully now to avoid burnout. She also makes time for things that aren’t purely productive, but that fill her in other ways. Each week, she hosts her best friends at her residence and makes a meal for them, relishing the chance to enjoy an evening with good company and good food.
Creemer is working to bring sustainability to her community. In her role at the Student Sustainability Center at the EMU, she helps to get students involved at the UO through volunteering. She leads weekly meetings for her volunteer group, facilitating their ideas and helping them realize projects that help create and maintain healthy communities.
She taught the group how to be more confident leading diverse groups of students, and stayed to watch them thrive as their students showed up to the garden.
Sustainability is personal
Creemer realizes now that sustainability begins from within. She tells her volunteers as much. In the first week of the training, she talked to her teams about what sustainability really means. “It’s not just environmental, it’s creating processes in the world that can last," she says. “It’s also creating processes within yourself that can last.”
She loves how her work ties together her passions. “We have to look at sustainability as a redefinition of structures, which is fascinating and mind-boggling and kind of terrifying,” Creemer says, noting that it is about more than just the environment.
“We have to look at sustainability as a redefinition of structures, which is fascinating and mind-boggling and kind of terrifying.”
This summer, she will teach sailing in the Caribbean with a summer camp program, and next fall she wants to study abroad in Kenya to learn more about global health.
Through all her activities, Creemer has made a pledge to herself to model healthy behavior for her peers in the Honors College. Already, students put pressure on themselves to “perform,” but she wants to help take it down a notch.
“Focus on what’s bringing you joy,” Creemer says. “You’re more than the work you produce, and you need to take care of yourself to be able to participate in the things you love.”