A group studying Mass Media, for example, would meet in the evening in the Lowther Avenue home of CBC Radio Broadcasters Betty Tomlinson and Allan Anderson.

SEED was founded by the then Toronto Board of Education as a summer program for high school age students in 1968 during the Pierre Trudeau era, a period that also produced Rochdale College and Theatre Passe Muraille and fostered the growth of Coach House Books and a number of other experimental institutions in Toronto.

During that fall and winter, students ran SEED without any coordinators, using an office made available free by St Thomas Anglican Church on Huron Street.

It was also known for its catalyst system in which university students, professors, community members and experts-at-large on a variety of fields facilitated classes.

[1] Other notable catalysts included noted social activist June Callwood, CBC Radio broadcaster Allan Anderson, then-architect Colin Vaughan, journalists John Gault and Maggie Siggins, advertising executive Billy Edwards (one of the subjects of Allan King's film A Married Couple), and notable Toronto City Alderman Ying Hope.

A notable achievement was a short film entitled Life Times Nine made by SEED students that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973.

[2] Notable alumni include blogger, journalist, activist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow; former head of the Ontario Securities Commission and V.P.

of the Toronto Stock Exchange, lawyer Edward Waitzer;[3] musician and producer Efrim Menuck; Harvard physics professor and Chair of the Physics Department Melissa Franklin, a co-discover of the top quark; Denina Simmons Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Environmental Biology; visual artists Eli Langer and Michael Lewis; author Claudia Casper; gh3 principal and award-winning landscape architect, Diana Gerrard; intersex activist, researcher and professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University, Morgan Holmes; professor of psychology at Conestoga College, Barry Cull; and photographer Michael McLuhan, son of Marshall McLuhan, notable artist Jesse B. Harris.