❤️Leading with Grace, Serving with Heart: Honoring Wanda Maggart
The May Helping Hands Award is awarded to Wanda Maggart!
Some volunteers lend a hand. Wanda Maggart lends both, along with her heart, her wit, and more homemade goodies than any of us can count.
Before joining the MG Association, Wanda built a distinguished career in higher education, retiring as Senior Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Durham Technical Community College, where she championed technical education as a gateway to opportunity and helped strengthen the college’s ties to its community.
Her spirit of service extends well beyond her career. Today, among many other volunteer efforts, she is a lifetime member of the Friends of the Library of Southport and Oak Island and a supporter of our region’s Native Plant Festival going back to 2017.
But it is what Wanda has given to this Association that we celebrate today. She has served us at every level: As a Master Gardener certified in 2018; two years as Vice President of this Association, two years as President, and a remarkable list of roles in between — Shady Native lead, Plant Sale Committee chair, Herb Workshop co-chair, Social Committee lead, and creator and lead of the Whirligig Committee, an idea that was hers from the start.
This spring, her fingerprints were all over two of our biggest successes. As co-leader of the Herb Container Workshop, she welcomed a full house of 51 participants across two sessions, guiding each one through starting herbs from cuttings, plugs, and seeds and sending every gardener home with a container garden of their own. And as lead of our Scholarship Committee, she has shepherded the 2026 Educational Award Program, through which our association awards three $2,000 educational awards to graduating Brunswick County seniors pursuing horticulture and related fields — cultivating people as well as plants, and serving as the program’s public face and point of contact for students across the county.
No job has ever been too big or too small for Wanda. From scrubbing pickle barrels and power washing the hoop house, to serving as our liaison with community groups, she shows up — always with kindness, always with a smile. She is intelligent, funny, welcoming, a gifted organizer, and a genuine listener, and she has devoted countless hours to making this Association what it is today and to instill hope for the impact this Association has going forward.
She has done it all with that characteristic Southern grace – a blend of warmth, politeness, humbleness, and unwavering respect to make everyone feel like family. As someone here put it recently, commenting on our advanced age and us being at tad set in our ways, “she may be the only MG member that everybody likes”. Now that’s a heck of a compliment!
For her years of leadership, her tireless service, and the warmth she brings to everything she touches, the Brunswick County Extension Master Gardener Volunteer Association is proud to present the Helping Hands Award to Wanda Maggart. Wanda, you are a star.
