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The Pleasanton Community of Character Collaborative is set to celebrate the recipients of its annual Juanita Haugen Awards next week.
And what a standout group for 2024: Lynn Gatehouse, Wayne Johnson and local nonprofit Sunflower Hill.
“Their examples inspire each of us to remember these important values in our own lives and do what we can to make a difference in Pleasanton,” collaborative officials said in a press release announcing the winners last week.
The awards are named in honor of late former Pleasanton school board president Juanita Haugen, who helped create the collaborative and embodied the key traits they look for in each recipient: “the values of responsibility, compassion, self-discipline, honesty, respect and integrity.”
Each of this year’s honorees expressed gratitude when I reached out to them for reactions.
Gatehouse, a retired teacher of sixth grade at Harvest Park Middle School in Pleasanton who in recent years has been advocating for mental health awareness on the Board of Directors of the Alan Hu Foundation, told me she was “both honored and humbled to be recognized as worthy of the Juanita Haugen Community of Character Award.”
“I greatly admired Mrs. Haugen and had the benefit of her advice and support during my many years as a teacher and her many years as a Trustee in PUSD,” Gatehouse said. “I will strive to model Pleasanton’s Community of Character traits … to further the mission of the Alan Hu Foundation to promote mental health, raise awareness, remove stigma surrounding mental disorders, and to support fundamental research for cures.”
“To be recognized with Wayne Johnson (our sons have been friends for over 30 years) and Sunflower Hill makes this award even more meaningful to me,” she added.
An avid outdoorsman and recently retired community pastor at Valley Bible Church, Johnson has been volunteering in the community for decades. Collaborative reps cited his efforts to help start basketball and softball leagues in the 1980s, to support senior programs, to lend time to meal service and food donation operations and more.
“I was first moved that our community would make the effort to honor individuals that make a difference in our community,” Johnson said of receiving news of the collaborative’s choice.
“Secondly, I am very thankful that by being nominated for this award, it gives me an opportunity to acknowledge the thousands of individuals in our community that have stepped up, volunteered and participated in serving our local and greater community through events that I have been able to put in place over the years. We are blessed with a great community,” he added.
And this year’s organizational recipient is Sunflower Hill, a Tri-Valley nonprofit that focuses on providing residential, vocational and educational opportunities for local adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“We’re thrilled to have been honored with the esteemed Juanita Haugen Community of Character Award,” Sunflower Hill development director Jennifer Oxe told me.
“At Sunflower Hill, we hold ourselves to the highest standards, echoing the values embodied by Juanita Haugen herself,” Oxe said. “We are dedicated to serving the needs of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and ensuring that we create spaces and places where they can live, work, learn and thrive as part of the greater community.”
The collaborative also recently announced the 11 Pleasanton students who received this year’s Juanita Haugen Memorial Scholarships. (Yes, 11! More than double last year’s total due to increased fundraising and donations, according to the organization.)
Available to graduating seniors from each of Pleasanton’s three public high schools, the financial awards are given based on the student-applicant’s “commitment to the values of the Community of Character, their experiences, and things they’ve overcome as well as their service to their school, family and community,” organizers said.
The 2024 scholarship recipients were: Ishmeet Dhillon, Matteo Gable, Jessi Mejia Oropeza, Ajay Reyes and Madeline Zhang from Amador Valley High School; Valentina Avalos, Elias Badillo-Benard, Peter Bennett, Jake Grijalva and Colin Harrison from Foothill High School; and David Peregrina from Village High School.
The scholarship students will join the Juanita Haugen Award winners at a special recognition luncheon hosted by the collaborative next Wednesday (May 15) at the Veterans Memorial Building in downtown Pleasanton. For tickets and more information, go to bit.ly/cc-luncheon.
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What a Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.