Lick-Wilmerding High School’s motto, “Head, Heart, Hands,” resonates throughout the school’s development. The Heart of LWHS can be seen in many ways from school pride to the intellectual vitality exhibited by both students and teachers, their joy in design and making in the shops, by its values of civility and compassion, and notably it can be seen in its service to both local and global communities.
The school currently has a four-year Public Purpose Program (PPP) implemented into the curriculum through the Center for Civic Engagement, the hub of community outreach at LWHS. In this program, Frosh attend workshops led by the PPP interns, Sophomores have a service 40 hour requirement, and upperclassmen take at least one class a year that has PPP values incorporated into its curriculum. Since its founding, LWHS and Lux have fostered a culture of civic engagement.
In the early 1900s, Lux girls were always engaging in bake sales and fundraising events, often for a fund that would help orphaned children around the world be adopted.
During World War I, Lux students replaced most of their social activities with “war work.” They became deeply involved with the Red Cross. Work in almost every shop was dedicated to providing American soldiers with warm clothing and comfort items. In 1918 alone, the girls knitted over 600 garments made with wool purchased through their fundraising initiatives. The Red Cross then distributed these items to those who needed them.
LWHS alumni have immersed themselves in helping the world through other methods as well, including through education initiatives and involvement in government.
A grand exemplar of public purpose is Sam Mihara who graduated LWHS in 1951. Mihara and his family were among the 120 Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. Mihara, now retired from his work as an aerospace engineer, is currently an activist who frequently speaks from personal experiences about the United States’ Japanese Internment Camps and more broadly about mass incarceration. To advocate his message, Mihara wrote The Life and Times of Sam Mihara: As Told to Alexandra Villarreal. Mihara and his family were first imprisoned at an internment camp in Pomona, and then sent to the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945 they were released and returned to San Francisco to try and rebuild their lives. Sam Mihara found his way to LWHS.
At LWHS, Mihara enjoyed “the friendliness and warmth of classmates. After suffering much hatred during World War II, to have people treat me with respect and a family-type relationship was very welcoming.”
LWHS gave Mihara a direction for his career. He said, “[his] math and science teachers made the topics so easy to understand and fun, like a series of puzzles to solve.” Mihara said that the teachers and environment at LWHS drew him towards mechanical engineering, so he applied to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
However, shortly after receiving his MIT acceptance, his father lost his job, which significantly affected his family’s financial situation. Mihara was forced to consider an alternate choice: the University of California, Berkeley, as it was cheap and provided a quality education.
Mihara earned his undergraduate degree in engineering at UC Berkeley and graduate degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles.
One of Mihara’s professors at Berkeley introduced him to a job at the Boeing Company. Mihara was a rocket scientist and an executive in the space program. He helped to “insert many satellites into space orbit.”
After retiring from Boeing, Mihara founded his own consulting firm. Mihara’s advocacy began in 2011, when the Department of Justice requested that the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation have a former resident of an internment camp speak at their conference.
To prepare, Mihara gathered together family and professional photos to create a presentation for the conference. The conference was a success and Mihara began to receive many invitations to speak. Mihara is now a prominent speaker on mass imprisonment — he has addressed audiences at museums, libraries, civil rights conferences, the U.S. Department of Justice, members of law firms, students and faculty at both national and internatonal universities and high schools, including LWHS, and visited detention facilities for undocumented immigants. He returns frequently to speak at Heart Mountain. Mihara has spoken to over 65,000 people.
Mihara’s presentations and work has inspired LWHS to further pursue justice, leading to the Center of Civic Engagement to develop a week of workshops dedicated to educating students on social justice issues. The annual event is named for him, “The Sam Mihara Days of Justice.”
The Center, founded in 2008, has the goal of “[empowering] students to be architects of positive social change,” according to its brochure. The three facets of this mission are fostering a space of inclusion, connections, and leadership. The Sam Mihara Days of Justice fall under “inclusion,” alongside the affinity spaces Ad Ingenium Faciendum (AIF) and Fortus Mulieribus (FM) and a student group named Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). The Center’s motto is that “there are some adventures that can only happen outside of the classroom.”
More recent alumnus too, revel in the spirit of public purpose. Two such examples are Topher White and Jessica Ladd, former students who graduated LWHS in 2000 and 2004 respectively.
White, who pursued and received a Bachelors of Arts in Physics at Kenyon College after graduating LWHS, has worked with several engineering companies and different firms, but in 2012 he founded his own: Rainforest Connection (RFCx).
RFCx’s goal is to innovatively combat illegal logging and deforestation — a proxy for curbing carbon emissions and animal poaching. White and his team reuse old phones, solar panels and take advantage of audio analysis to distinguish chainsaws from fauna.
White said, “This didn’t come because of any high-tech solution, it just came from using what is already there and I am thoroughly convinced that…that you can build similar solutions in different contexts.”
White’s mindset of reusing and innovating is similar to Ladd’s work. Ladd, who graduated from Pomona College with a Bachelors of Arts in Public Policy and Human Sexuality, also uses technology to approach problems in new ways.
Since Pomona she has also studied at Harvard, Stanford, University of Washington and Johns Hopkins where she received her PhD in Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases.
Ladd worked in The White House as Domestic Policy Intern advising President Obama on the need for abortion. Ladd is a self-described “serial founder.” Ladd has founded three companies — two that tackle sexual health advocacy and support sexual assault survivors, respectively, Sexual Health Innovations and its succesor Callisto.
Ladd founded Sexual Health Innovations while working on here PhD, with the goal of creating innovative technological solutions to “advance sexual health and wellbeing” — one of these solutions became Callisto — named for a nymph who in Greek mythology is raped by Zeus).
Callisto is a sexual assault reporting system for college campuses that aims to hold accountable rapists by detecting repeat assailants and “matching” or checking if a perpetrator has assaulted someone else in the Callisto database. Ladd no longer runs either Sexual Health Innovations or Callisto but stated that her ultimate goal with Callisto is that “survivors get the support and justice that they deserve.”
From the late 19th century to the 21st century, LWHS, which identifies itself as a private school with a public purpose, has been and continues to be committed to doing the work that furthers the conversations and action surrounding social justice.
