Meet Sarah Hewins

Sarah Hewins

Sarah is currently in her fifth term as Select Board member. She has previously served as both Chair and Vice-Chair of the Board. She was elected twice for five-year terms to Carver's Planning Board, and was Carver's Conservation Agent for 15 years.

Sarah has lived in Carver for more than 30 years with her husband, Steve Dewhurst, where they started their own small software consulting business. Their son David and daughter-in-law Casey are both graduates of Carver schools and now live in Middleborough with their three children Jacob, Colin, and Eloise.

In over 20 years as an elected official and public servant, Sarah has delivered on every single promise she has made to voters. Sarah is the volunteer reader at the Library's Tuesday Toddler Story Hour and has been for the past 27 years. She was also the Chair of the Municipal Playground Committee that built Carver's first Community Playground.

Volunteering on many levels for her community and for the region, Sarah also serves on the Board of Directors of the South Shore Community Action Council where she supports the Council's food distribution, early childhood education, financial literacy, and energy conservation programs.

She is a co-founder and was a volunteer Executive Director of the Young People's Alliance of Carver--which recruited adult volunteers and young adult staff--giving our children a safe, supervised after-school environment that involved the whole community where they could learn self-esteem with the goal of drug- and substance-abuse prevention.

Sarah served as Chair of the seven-town Plymouth / Carver Aquifer Advisory Committee, which included Carver; as a commissioner for our regional planning agency, SRPEDD; and as a member of the regional A. D. Makepeace Task Force.

She received the Government Service Award from the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association for working together with the agricultural community to promote healthy conservation practices.

Sarah has received statewide recognition for her work with the environment, with our children and support of education, and for her support of family farms and working families.

Sarah's mother was a gifted artist who, after attending college, became a missionary to Japan. Later in life, her mother found herself abandoned by her husband with two young children. She and her two children did have the faith, hope, and love that carried them through many hardships, more than thirty moves, and some periods of homelessness during Sarah's childhood.

One of Sarah's earliest memories is of her family being evicted from their home, and her mother had to work hard to keep her family together. Learning from her mother's example to meet challenges head on and never give up, Sarah did just that: waitressing, pumping gas, walking and grooming thoroughbred race horses right through earning her Ph.D. in the sociology of community from Princeton University.

After earning her Ph.D., Sarah was courted by corporations who wanted to capitalize on her expertise to persuade residents to accept building projects and policies that were profitable for the corporations but against the residents' interests. Sarah instead became the Environmental Co-Chair of the League of Women Voters of Mississippi, helping to forge a community of mutual respect and success among hunters, environmentalists, and state government to save hundreds of acres of wetlands in the Mississippi delta. This was her first win-win-win success.

Sarah is known for her win-win-win solutions. As a Planning Board member and then as Conservation Agent, she had a 100% success rate in approving new businesses but always conditioned approval so that residents, our environment, and our drinking water were protected. She worked to preserve 600 acres of land in Carver to protect our drinking water and for recreation, hunting, and endangered species protection. She found ways to cut budgets without cutting services, established rules for affordable housing that respect all residents, and brought in more than $4.5 million in grant money to the town.

Sarah has never forgotten where she came from, and she is proud to be an advocate for children, seniors, veterans, public education, family farms, and working families.

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