A 50th anniversary celebration of the Human Rights Commission

Last spring, 80 students were selected to receive summer research grants to support 10 weeks of independent research in the sciences or humanities under the guidance of a faculty advisor. Projects covered a wide range of topics, such as wastewater opioid analysis, the influence of hip flexibility on running gait, LGBTQ and person of color representation in young adult fiction, environmental racism, and more, including:

Tech-savvy students are on a mission to diversify computer science through tutoring

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.”

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.

Longtime restaurateur and neophyte politician Daniel Nguyen ’01 has a lot on his plate.

Everybody in Tacoma wants a piece of Bernadette Ray ’99, MAT’01. She can’t go to the grocery store without folks stopping to talk, so she tends to do her shopping at night. As the new principal of Wilson High School, Bernadette loves everyone in her community—current students, former students, parents, teachers—and being at the center of it all.

As a home visitor for behavioral health nonprofit LifeWorks NW, Ben Reuler ’99 has a mission to secure safe and affordable housing, work, and food for families who are fleeing domestic violence or struggling with addiction and poverty.