Five men are responsible for changing Amy King’s perspective permanently. These men, the first five employees of her husband’s construction company, all had a “pretty significant criminal history” and had spent time in prison. King admits she had been sheltered her entire life, but learning the backgrounds and journeys of these men opened her eyes….

Valerie Segrest’s elders and her community are the reason she dedicated her life to food systems. Segrest grew up a part of the Muckleshoot Tribe, located just south of Auburn, in a community where the closest grocery store was nearly 10 miles away in an area considered “food insecure.” Her elders often told her, “If…

David Bateman, a lawyer at K&L Gates who spent his time “finding people who were doing bad things on the internet,” didn’t fully know the concept of revenge porn until he met Holly Jacobs. Jacobs sought help from K&L Gates after explicit photos of her were nonconsensually shared on the internet. Jacobs’ case, Bateman says,…

Delaney Ruston made her first film when she was a resident at UC San Francisco. While the rest of her medical school classmates delivered their final presentations in typical PowerPoint fashion, Ruston was inspired by the “video camera revolution” and the capability of film to portray people’s stories, she said. In the film, she told…

Pai is an award-winning author, podcaster, and the city of Seattle’s 2023-24 Civic Poet. She has spent more than two decades in the literary field, penning 13 books…

Photo by Sung Park

Jose Iñiguez discovered the art of opera through a PBS special. As a teenager, he came across a program featuring a tenor singing an aria while watching TV with his dad…

Photo by Ashley Genevieve

On November 22, 1981, a teenage Christina Scheppelmann saw Don Carlo in Hamburg, Germany. The five-act opera, which Scheppelmann called an “incredibly monumental, relevant piece of music,” displayed the life and conflicts of a fictional 16th-century European prince. From then on, she was in love. “(Opera) is incredibly emotional. It’s exciting,” she says. “If you…

Her familial dedication to service and passion for community followed her into her 20-year career working in the nonprofit, government, and community development field in roles across the U.S. and internationally. In September 2022, Shigaki took over as CEO of Friends of Waterfront Seattle, where she works to manage, program, and fundraise to revitalize the city’s Waterfront Park.

“This nation was founded on the idea that we’re all entitled to equal rights, even if we didn’t have it at the time,” Gonzalez says. “And I think our job is to reinterpret those fundamental principles in a way that gives meaning to those principles to all of us.”