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For 113 years, the Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 has positively impacted our community through service projects large and small. We have an opportunity to join forces with community partners and deliver big impacts to underserved areas of our community as early as this summer!

Last fall, Joint Municipal Action Committee Chair Elizabeth Bonbright shared with our Club the community assessment work they completed. That work identified key priority areas for community projects. Our club’s Major Projects Committee has been reviewing JMACs recommendations this past year, with special focus on our ability serve youth in Southeast Tacoma.

Major Projects Committee Co-Chairs Jim Whitacre and Jackie Flowers will join Trust for Public Lands, Metro Parks Tacoma, and Greentrike to present plans for transforming outdated school yards into vibrant green spaces that will serve as neighborhood parks outside of school hours. In conjunction, there are also opportunities to serve youth in underserved areas centered around literacy.

While Tacoma is arguably home to the most spectacular urban park system, access is unequal. 31% of Tacoma residents do not have a park within a 10-minute walk of home―the largest park access gap in

Washington. Like in many cities, park access follows inequities in income, health, and other resources. And most land is already developed, leaving limited opportunities to create new parks. Tacoma’s Eastside neighborhood has fewer parks than wealthier neighborhoods with more parks and more resources. We’re working to change that by partnering with community members and local schools.¹

Transforming schoolyards into vibrant parks has the unique potential to expand nature access and create new community spaces in Tacoma’s neighborhoods with limited existing park access. In Tacoma, renovating and opening schoolyards to the public after school would put a high-quality park within a 10-minute walk of 88% of residents. ¹

Trust for Public Land has created more than 250 community schoolyards nationwide. Every

schoolyard is designed by students to reflect local cultures and feature students’ interests. For the Tacoma project they are partnering with Metro Parks Tacoma, Tacoma Public Schools, State of Washington, Names Family Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Boeing, Bamford Foundation.

The Major Projects Committee sees this project as a perfect fit for our club! By partnering with these organizations and leveraging existing projects, we can get immediate traction and connect our club to underserved youth and residents most in need. We look forward to sharing more with you and planning for our next major community service project!

^{1 - Information provided by Trust for Public Lands}

David Fischer’s professional background in the arts began as a professional theater artist in 1977. His degrees in theater and film (BA, MFA), combined with his Leadership Certificate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, furthered by his work experience, have allowed him to become deeply invested in the arts through theater production, performing arts presenting, youth education, arts management, fundraising, advocacy, university teaching, and urban design. Previously, he has worked as:

• Producing Artistic Director for Tacoma Little Theatre
• Executive Director of the Pierce County Arts Commission
• Deputy Executive Director of Broadway Center for the Performing Arts
• Executive Director of the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, California

Fischer reorganized the Luther Burbank Center, including its staff, fundraising, capital investment, endowment growth, governance, and programmatic impact resulting in an improvement to the balance sheet of $14 million in 5.5 years, and the creation of a new community hospital adjacent to the arts campus.

Since 2006, Fischer has served as Executive Director of Tacoma’s non-profit performing arts center, Tacoma Arts Live, working to transform the organization to focus on strengthening its service to the community, particularly in:

• Education through the arts,
• DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and access)
• Historic facility improvements and preservation
• Economic development for Pierce County
• Professional theater production
• Advocacy for public funding of arts, heritage and science non-profits.

Faaluaina (Lua) Pritchard is the Executive Director of the Asia Pacific Cultural Center since May 2010 and has been with APCC since early 1997.  She is the executive leader of operations for APCC.  She hails from the village of Amouli in American Samoa.  She came to America in 1966 at the age of ten and landed in San Francisco, CA.  There she was educated from elementary to graduating from Carson High School in Southern California and attended Pepperdine University in Malibu.  Faaluaina has over 35 years of non-profit management experience. She was the Executive Director of Korean Women's Association from 1996 to 2009; and was with KWA for 19.5 years.  Under her leadership there - they developed close to $100 million valued housing and community projects.

Her community work is very extensive and speaks to her talents and skills as a community organizer.  To name a few she is the Chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition of Pierce County, board member of Washington State Arts Commission,  Multicare Advisory Board, ARCORA Fluoridation Advisory Board, Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium, Pierce County Arts & Culture Coalition, Tacoma Urban League Board, KBTC TV-BATES College Board, Washington State Department of Transportation Board, Governor Council on Environmental Justice and Commissioner of the Pierce County Arts Commission.

Dan Wirth, currently serving as the interim Northwest Regional Executive of the American Red Cross, has a committed history of fulfilling the Red Cross mission over the past decade. Beginning in March 2014 with the Indiana Region, his career quickly led him to accept the position as the Regional Disaster Officer for the Kentucky Region in 2016. Here he helped guide and mentor the disaster workforce of 17 for a 119-county territory. After four years of leadership in the disaster line of service, in January 2020, Dan moved to Washington State to serve as the Executive Director for the South Puget Sound and Olympics Chapter serving eight counties.  

Over these past three years, Dan has grown the South Puget Sound and Olympics Chapter Board of Directors membership to 17 active members, enjoys engaging Community Volunteer Leaders (CVL) who serve as an extension of the executive directors role, support fundraising activities, open doorways for blood drives that advance the Sickle Cell initiative, looks for opportunities to serve with Services to Armed Forces, and continues to deploy to serve in multiple leadership roles during disaster relief operations.  

Dan’s deployments have spanned the nation including the Flint Water Crisis, Texas Flooding, South Carolina Flooding, Hurricane Harvey in Texas, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, the recent wildfires in California and Oregon, and served extended deployments for the Kentucky tornado operation helping the most vulnerable in Mayfield and surrounding counties, as well able to serve the migrant population on Pine Island during Hurricane Ian. Dan is bilingual and his ability to communicate with non-English speaking disaster survivors has helped expedite response and recovery work in these communities.  

Matt Driscoll is a reporter, columnist and opinion editor at The News Tribune. He grew up in Edgewood, and has worked at The News Tribune since 2015. He has previously written for Seattle Weekly, the Weekly Volcano, the Tacoma Reporter and other regional publications.

Wen was born in China at the end of the Great Cultural Revolution. Being the victim of this horrific atrocity that killed two million intellectuals and destroyed traditional Chinese culture, Wen's parents had mixed feelings about her education. Despite their discouragement, Wen eventually won a national prize at a science competition when she was 16. Hence, she went to a top university for undergraduate study and then came to the U.S. in 1994 for graduate school. Wen received a Ph.D. in Biology at the California Institute of Technology in 2000. Because of her personal experience of being brainwashed in China, she decided to be a voice for the voiceless. Since 2012, she has given hundreds of presentations to community organizations about Chinese culture, history, and society.
Wen has been working for Caltech since 2000 as a biologist and information scientist. Her everyday work includes scientific outreach by speaking at conferences and seminars at universities. In her personal life, she is an active
member of Amnesty International, focusing on human rights in China. She serves as a board member and community liaison for Caltech Women in Biology and Biological Engineering.