Robert McPherson ’91 has been singing since he was a very young boy. “I was a preacher’s kid. I grew up singing gospel,” he says.
Decades have passed since he performed his first solo, but McPherson’s passion for music is as strong as it ever was. Instead of singing traditional gospel tunes, he’s an accomplished operatic tenor. And even though the coronavirus has shuttered performance venues across the country, McPherson is still singing for his public, online.
Mauricio Mendez ’20 was 3 years old when he first experienced otherness, being pushed to the margins of a world that he had believed to be his own. Another child at daycare had spit in his face, and though he spoke no English, having recently moved to the United States from Mexico, Mauricio was determined to tell the teacher. “The lady didn’t understand,” he says. “The only other way to explain it was by demonstrating.”
The clock is ticking. Only one hour remains before the winning team is chosen—and a trip to New York City and $500 are on the line. Kala`i Beck ’20 and his three teammates are huddled around a table in the student center’s Murray Boardroom, brainstorming ways to repurpose coconut husks and shells left over from the production of coconut water.
Twenty years ago, Tanya Saine Durand ’93 and her colleagues at the nonprofit Children’s Museum of Tacoma found themselves wondering if their jobs—their mission—should continue to exist. After an unsuccessful fundraising campaign and a steep rent hike, the museum was facing substantial debt. “We were in this very humble place of asking the community, ‘Should we shut our doors?’ And resoundingly, folks said, ‘No. This is a valuable asset. We need to strengthen it.’”
Soccer was Maya Mendoza-Exstrom's way to a Puget Sound education. Now, 16 years after graduating, she’s making sure that local children can reap the benefits of the sport she loves. Mendoza-Exstrom ’03, who is general counsel at Seattle Sounders FC, Seattle’s major league soccer club, was the founding executive director of the RAVE Foundation, which aims to make the sport more accessible to young people in the city’s underserved communities.
