If you ever need a working definition of the word “hero,” you could do worse than point at Dr. Kwane Stewart. For more than a decade, the California veterinarian, known widely as The Street Vet, has walked city sidewalks giving free medical care to the pets of people living without stable housing. On Sunday night, CNN made it official: Dr. Kwane was named its 2023 Hero of the Year.
The title came down to a public vote. Dr. Kwane had first been chosen by CNN’s audience as one of the network’s Top 10 Heroes of the year, and viewers then elected him the winner. Anderson Cooper and Laura Coates announced the honor during CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute.
It started with a $3 flea treatment
The turning point came in 2012. Dr. Kwane was working as a shelter veterinarian, watching dozens of animals euthanized in a single day, and it was hollowing him out. He had reached the point where he could barely make himself go in. Around the same time, walking past an unhoused man he had seen before outside a convenience store, he spotted a skin condition on the man’s dog and stepped in to treat it. The whole intervention cost about three dollars out of his own pocket. Ten days later the dog had turned a corner, tail wagging, and the man looked up in tears to thank him. That moment redirected his career.
By his own account, the work did as much for him as it did for the animals. He had been pulling away from the people in his life, letting calls from his own mother go unreturned for days. Tending to these pets, and the people who loved them, pulled him back. He has said that is why he keeps doing it.
For years he funded the care himself. In 2020 he formalized the mission as a nonprofit, Project Street Vet, and launched an ongoing GoFundMe to sustain it. The organization runs on volunteers who walk the streets identifying animals that need care and treat them at no charge. What began in California has since grown, with the work expanding into other cities including Orlando and Atlanta.
He split the prize with the people he beat
The top honor carries a $100,000 award, plus $300,000 in additional funding and resources from the Elevate Prize Foundation. Then Dr. Kwane did something that was not in anyone’s script. Standing before his nine fellow finalists, he announced that the $100,000 was not staying with him. It divides evenly ten ways, he pointed out, so he made it his contribution to all of them, telling the other honorees he was simply proud to know them.
In his acceptance speech, he circled back to the child who first dreamed of this life. He said he had wanted to be a veterinarian since he was small, and that if a kid could imagine doing something with real impact, he was lucky to have actually found it. He went further, into the questions that come with getting older, about why we are here and what defines us, and landed on his own answer: humanity. Looking out for one another, believing in one another, helping one another. The people in that room, he said, embodied it.
Dr. Kwane’s résumé backs up the vote. A veterinarian for roughly two decades and a graduate of Colorado State University’s veterinary program, he had already turned the Street Vet mission into a book, What It Takes to Save a Life: A Veterinarian’s Quest for Healing and Hope, before the award. But the numbers and credentials are almost beside the point. The thing that made a national audience pick him was simpler: a man who saw a suffering animal and a struggling person and decided, over and over, that both were worth showing up for.
References
- CNN. Dr. Kwane Stewart, who cares for the pets of those experiencing homelessness, is CNN’s Hero of the Year (Dec. 10, 2023). cnn.com
- American Veterinary Medical Association. Founder of Project Street Vet named CNN Hero of the Year. avma.org
- Project Street Vet. projectstreetvet.org
