Cassandra Hage

While sustainability efforts of any scale tend to be beneficial to their communities, Cassie Hage has made it a mission to share WashU’s sustainability practices—and its benefits—with the St. Louis region. 

“Cassie is a compassionate, kind, and tireless servant leader who has dedicated her professional and personal life to supporting people in need and advancing critical environmental causes,” said her nominator, Phil Valko, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Sustainability. “Cassie’s care for others—people, non-human species, and ecological systems—is woven into her fabric, and she elegantly stiches together communities of collaborators everywhere she goes with the same thread of care and service. Her passion and vision are contagious.”

Hage—a St. Louis native and University City High School alumna—earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Truman State University. As a student activist there, she founded the Kirksville Bike Co-op, a student-run community bike shop, and coordinated Truman’s annual Earth Week events. She also helped establish Truman’s Environmental Studies minor.

Before joining WashU, Hage was Executive Director of St. Louis Earth Day for five years. Under her leadership, St. Louis Earth Day started new programs like Recycling On the Go, the Green Dining Alliance, and Earth Day Action Grants, and grew the cornerstone St. Louis Earth Day Festival and their outreach and education efforts.

In her WashU role as Assistant Director of the Office of Sustainability, Hage supports numerous efforts like implementing key areas of WashU’s strategic plan for sustainable operations. She collaborates across the university to support student and staff sustainability programs and projects, and fosters connections between academic theory and practical applications.

Her successes in the Office of Sustainability have led to systemic changes at WashU. She spearheads the Circularity Center, in which schools, departments, students, faculty and staff share used and unneeded items to prevent waste. This includes a major annual effort, when students move out at the end of each spring semester, to repurpose items they leave behind and donate them to St. Louis-area schools and organizations. Hage embraced the Lights Out Heartland initiative, and drove efforts at WashU to mitigate wasted electricity at night. She founded and organizes the Moppet Swap, “a children’s clothing and gear swap for frugal and eco-savvy parents in the St. Louis area,” which is completely free to users, with excess going to Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition and Nurses for Newborns. 

Outside of her WashU role, Hage has volunteered at polling places in local and national elections and canvassed door-to-door for reproductive rights; has been involved for 10 years with her local community garden; is a regular at neighborhood meetings in Tower Grove, where she lives and advocates on issues like pedestrian safety; and works with her neighbors to plant trees on her block. 

“Cassie’s ethic of service manifests in all that she does and is deeply tied to St. Louis,” Valko said.