On Saturday, September 17th, the Sierra Club’s Bay Area community will gather together in Berkeley to honor and celebrate the 2022 recipients of the San Francisco Bay Chapter awards. Each of these extraordinary environmental leaders has made lasting impacts on the landscape of the Bay Area and beyond, be it through innovative policy solutions, inspiring and organizing community movements, or guiding people to transformative experiences in nature.
We invite the Bay Area community to join us at our awards celebration on September 17th. Tickets and sponsorships may be purchased online here or by contacting Development Director Matt Bielby at (510) 848-0800 ext. 321 or matt.bielby@sierraclub.org.
We are delighted to announce the 2022 Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter honorees:
Vicky Hoover
A wilderness protector powered by her love of the outdoors
Recipient of the Ed Bennett Lifetime Achievement Award
Emeryville Mayor John Bauters
A visionary leader for safe and healthy Bay Area communities
Recipient of the inaugural David McCoard Visionary Award
Golden Gate Village Residents Council
Standing strong for their community in Marin’s only majority-Black public housing complex
Recipient of the Community Defender Award
Alfredo Angulo
An environmental justice organizer rooted in Richmond
Recipient of the Emerging Voices Award
Fairfax Council Member Renée Goddard
An empathic town leader with the courage and determination of an accomplished whitewater river runner
Recipient of the Phil Burton Badge of Courage Award
Continue reading below for more information on the achievements of our honorees.
VICKY HOOVER is the 2022 recipient of the Ed Bennett Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes a committed individual who has devoted their entire career to our shared mission and whose work makes a lasting impact on our lives.
Vicky joined the Sierra Club in 1966 and began leading outings for the organization the next year, following her family’s first, life-changing burro trip in the High Sierra. She has since introduced hundreds of people to wilderness through her guided trips.
In the mid-1980s, Vicky got involved in the Sierra Club’s conservation efforts, channeling her passion for wilderness into winning campaigns to protect it. As a member of our Chapter’s Wilderness Committee, Vicky was instrumental in the passage of the California Desert Protection Act. Vicky started the Club’s Northern California Desert Task Force and has led many trips to the desert areas.
Today, Vicky is the co-chair of the Sierra Club’s statewide 30x30 campaign, which aims to protect 30 percent of our state’s lands and waters by 2030 — and in doing so make access to nature more equitable. She is also the volunteer editor of two Sierra Club newsletters: Words of the Wild and Sierra Borealis: Alaska Report (she is an active volunteer for the Alaska Chapter, even though she lives in San Francisco). Vicky is an example to us all in the power of “standing up for what you stand on”.
Emeryville Mayor JOHN BAUTERS is the inaugural recipient of the David McCoard Visionary Award, established in honor of the late Chapter leader who exemplified a life of service and activism on behalf of environmental and humanitarian causes. John serves as Chair of both the Alameda County Transportation Commission and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, where he has been an outspoken and progressive voice on sustainable land use, environmental protection, and active transportation policies that support equitable, people-oriented communities. John was a leading voice in the passage, last summer, of the Air District’s Rule 6-5, which created one of the most stringent refinery emissions standards in the world. He is currently championing Air District Rules 9-4 and 9-6 which would advance building decarbonization by establishing the first zero NOx emissions standards for furnaces and water heaters.
In Emeryville, John championed an ordinance related to lead-safe renovation and repair, earning praise from the EPA. In 2018, Emeryville voters approved Measure C, a $50 million affordable housing bond he introduced that is programmed to build hundreds of units of infill affordable homes for low-income families, seniors, transition-aged youth, and people experiencing homelessness. An active transit enthusiast, John is perhaps best known for his community activism to make streets safe and communities healthy by supporting car-free infrastructure, including bicycles and public transit.
John has over 20 years of experience as a nonprofit professional, working as a legal aid attorney for people experiencing homelessness, an eviction defense trial attorney, and currently as a policy director on criminal justice reform, trauma recovery services, and community-based health care as an alternative to incarceration. He completes a 350-400 mile solo wilderness hike every year to promote and discuss the importance of conservation and the relationship between environmentalism and mental wellness.
The GOLDEN GATE VILLAGE RESIDENTS COUNCIL will receive the 2022 Community Defender Award, which recognizes exceptional work on behalf of environmental justice communities in the Bay Area. The five-member Golden Gate Village Resident Council is the elected representative body for Golden Gate Village, the only majority-Black public housing in Marin County. The Resident Council has been in a near-decade-long fight for the right to decide the future of their community. Residents have put forward a plan for a "Deep Green Revitalization" project that would address immediate environmental injustices within the neglected public housing complex; support job training for residents in the community; and ensure that current residents are not displaced, through the implementation of a community ownership model. As described in a recent Mother Jones article about the residents’ campaign, “Golden Gate Village has been and remains a foothold for low-income Black residents” as decades of “restrictive and exclusionary housing, environmental, and transportation development policies have made [Marin] the most segregated of the nine Bay Area counties.” Marin City’s Black population, now at about 23 percent, is half of what it was a decade ago.
Resident Council President Royce McLemore has said: “What we want is to be a model for the nation, and what can be done to preserve housing for poor people. You’re always going to have poor people, and we deserve a right to safe, decent, and sanitary housing.” McLemore has advocated for the Resident Plan at Marin Housing Commission meetings month after month for the past seven years. The Residents Plan finally became the County's preferred plan this year.
Depicted in the photo are GGVRC members Royce McLemore, Beverly Freeman, and Terry Thompson. GGVRC members not depicted are Danielle Hoff and Hattie Cook.
ALFREDO ANGULO is the 2022 winner of the Emerging Voices Award, which recognizes young people advocating for the environmental needs of their communities, as well as individuals or organizations that lift up youth voices calling for stronger, healthier, and cleaner communities. Alfredo (they/them) is an environmental justice organizer, lifelong Richmond resident, and a recent first-generation graduate from U.C. Berkeley, where they received a B.A. in Political Science. Growing up in Richmond, Alfredo witnessed every oil spill, fire, and gas leak from the second-largest refinery in California.
Through their work on projects such as the Bay Area Air Quality Management’s Community Emissions Reduction Plan for Richmond, as well as documenting the stories and visions of those most harmed by generations of fossil fuel operations with the Richmond Progressive Alliance’s Listening Project, Alfredo has cultivated a deep understanding of how the experiences of underserved communities have been shaped by racist policies like redlining, which fueled generations of disinvestment and neglect by government.
Alfredo is passionate about creating positive change for their community by fighting back against toxic legacies and putting decision-making power back into the hands of the community. They work to ensure an equitable and just transition away from fossil fuels towards a sustainable, regenerative society and economy that works for everyone, while ensuring that the voices of those most harmed by Richmond’s industrial roots are amplified and heard.
Fairfax Town Council Member RENÉE GODDARD is the 2022 winner of the Phil Burton Badge of Courage Award, bestowed upon elected officials who fight for social justice and environmental protections.
Renée Goddard will always be a whitewater river guide at heart. She spent over a decade whitewater guiding on California rivers, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the Zambezi River in Zambia, and rivers throughout Papua New Guinea, Siberia and Central Asia. Stories from the river preservation movement — including hearing David Brower speak about his agonizing decision to support the protection of Dinosaur Canyon in exchange for a dam that flooded Glen Canyon — galvanized Renée’s lifelong commitment to activism and protection of our natural resources.
Renée has exemplified this commitment over a decade of service on the Fairfax Town Council. Among her many environmental achievements, Renée has taken a leading role in advancing affordable housing policies, stopping the development of a new gas station, fighting for multi-modal transit facilities, and co-authoring an ordinance on single use plastic foodware. She promotes safe infrastructure for non-motorized active transportation, and leads by example, transporting herself entirely by bike.
Renée has been behind many local climate action initiatives: voting in favor of the County's first building electrification ordinance, the County's first landscape equipment electrification ordinance, and the allocation of funds to create a new climate action coordinator position via a shared service agreement with a neighboring town — a template for other small communities that want to act on climate. She is a leader in “placemaking,” inspiring people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community.
Both as an elected and a community member Renée is the real deal. She shows up. She takes care. She is one of the most empathic and visionary leaders in Marin County. And she is not afraid to speak truth to power; to call out when she sees injustice or environmental degradation. Through it all, Renée describes her river-running skills as core tools for flexible, focused leadership, saying: “Local politics is a series of Class 5 rapids, and rowing upstream is not an option.”
Join us at the awards ceremony and Chapter gathering on September 17th to raise a glass to these incredible environmental warriors!
