• Christina Holloway is receiving a Lifetimes of Achievement award on May 20. Read about the all the 2018 honorees.

When Christina Holloway moved to Palo Alto in 1968, she noticed that her elementary-aged children and their classmates didn't seem that interested in their school science classes.

"That struck me. Kids should be more interested in science," Holloway said. "I thought to myself, 'Maybe they'd be more interested if the class was taught outdoors.'"

Soon after, Holloway helped launch an outdoor nature and science program that would mark the start of her five-decades-long commitment to environmental education and open-space conservation.

Holloway served as the first board chair of the hands-on educational nature program Environmental Volunteers, which evolved out of those outdoor science classes at her children's school and now serves people of all ages throughout the Midpeninsula. She led the effort to take Hidden Villa, an organic farm and wilderness area in Los Altos Hills, from a private, family philanthropic effort to a nonprofit. As a board member of the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), she helped secure and protect thousands of acres of open space, parks and farmland in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, and more recently, she helped merge the Yosemite Association with the Yosemite Fund, putting fundraising, park conservation and education for Yosemite National Park under a single nonprofit called the Yosemite Conservancy.

"Christy is a visionary and also very charismatic," said Hal Cranston, former chairman of the Yosemite Fund, who worked with Holloway on the merger. Cranston credits her with establishing the consensus needed to complete — in less than one year — what he called a difficult process with many obstacles.

"When you see her and talk to her and work with her on a project, it's not too long before you think to yourself, 'I'll follow her anywhere,'" he said.

Holloway was chairwoman of the Yosemite Association Board of Trustees when she approached Cranston with the vision of combining both groups — something that had never been broached. She had to convince more than 50,000 people associated with the groups of the benefits of merging the nonprofit operations.

"When she first proposed the idea to each board and the stake holders, a third said, 'Absolutely not. This is the worst idea I've heard," Cranston said.

Within the year, each side came around, and with a unanimous vote from each board, the merger was completed at the end of 2009. Cranston said the merger has since served as a model for other nonprofits looking to consolidate efforts.

"I give a lot of credit to Christy for showing compassion and empathy but at the same time keeping an eye on the vision of what we were trying to do and being tough when we needed to be tough. It's hard to find someone with all of those qualities," Cranston said. "She's a force to be reckoned with but not a force to fear. She's just a very pleasant but determined individual. "

Holloway described her volunteer work as an evolutionary process.

"I've learned on the job the whole way," she said. "The courage to work on the (Yosemite) merger came as result of all the experience I had had up to that point."

Holloway got her start in the nonprofit world as president of the Junior League of Palo Alto. While there, she looked to Hidden Villa to learn how to launch the Environmental Volunteers programs in local schools.

Through the process, Holloway became very familiar with the farm's operations and programs, so when Hidden Villa was looking to turn the family trust into a nonprofit organization, Holloway stepped up to lead the effort.

While there, she worked with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District on using a conservation easement to restrict development on 1,560 acres of the Hidden Villa property. Using this type of method for land conservation was unheard of at the time, Holloway said.

"That whole process made me very aware that if we don't save this landscape, there's not going to be anyplace for people to commune with it or to teach these children in another generation, so I suddenly got very interested in land saving," she said.

In 1985, she joined the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which negotiates with local property owners to purchase parcels of land for open space and conservation. The private land trust has made permanent more than 75,000 acres of open space since its founding in 1977.

"To be able to preserve this natural environment and be able to look up at the mountains and go over to the coast ... what that does psychologically for everyone is enormous," she said.