Each year at Alumni Weekend, the school acknowledges significant alumni contributions and distinctions with
2022 Alumni Award Winners
DISTINGUISHED ALUMNA AWARD The Springside Distinguished Alumna Award recognizes an alumna who has made a significant contribution in her field and whose accomplishments have had an impact on the larger community.
Wanda Stewart '77 Stewart is a social innovator, community builder, and garden activist from Oakland, CA, where she runs garden-based education programs for schools. She is also executive director of the nonprofit Common Vision, which is dedicated to redistributing healthy food to feed people and build community resilience. Common Vision takes a unique approach to school gardens, using fruit trees and other perennials to create extremely highyielding, low-maintenance, and low-cost school gardens. Common Vision’s School Orchard Project provides fresh fruit to more than 100,000 lowincome children.
Wanda Stewart, an urban farmer and environmental education activist, embodies the SCH mission every day of her life. She is an alumna who has dedicated herself to bettering her community and her world.
school magazine fall 2022
Stewart has been called a “tireless champion and architect behind the garden project at Hoover Hawks Victory Garden.” That garden is an intergenerational hub of healing, learning, and wonder for her entire community. She has said that, previously, the Hoover Hawks Victory Garden, West Oakland, was known as a “food desert.” There were no grocery stores and corner stores didn’t sell
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fresh food. She and others were inspired to grow food because students were hungry. Their goal was to show students that they could grow their own food and create a place where they could be face-to-face with nature and understand their role in saving the planet. By teaching these students to care for the garden, they would learn how to care for themselves, their community, and their world. On volunteer days, people come from all over the neighborhood to work in the Hoover Hawks Garden. The garden plays a central role in seeding and growing all kinds of things, from plants to kids to families, flowing from seed to food to consumption and back again. Stewart has been known to say, “If you can grow a seed, you can grow yourself. My hope is to teach them to grow a seed and grow plants so they can grow themselves.” Classmates Ellen Nalle Hass and Carol Shelly shared this excerpt from the submission statement presented to the Awards Committee by Stewart’s classmates.