Difference Makers 2016

The Fallen Heroes Project, which has about a dozen leading members, helped spearhead the installation of a 24-foot monument at the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena last year. And since the group was founded in 2010, it has produced nearly 300 banners featuring the names and faces of fallen soldiers.

Spokane civic leaders had been working for years to expand medical education in the region by the time Elson Floyd was named president of Washington State University. The strategy at the time was to get the University of Washington to send more students, for more years, to the East Side of the state through an existing regional medical school program.

As she cruises through Spokane’s West Central neighborhood in her patrol car, Traci Ponto doesn’t wave at children. Instead, Ponto, the neighborhood’s police resource officer, smiles and flashes a peace sign in a bid to gain their trust.

Phil Tyler, the Spokane NAACP president, is finding ways to collaborate and find solutions to help people of color as racial tensions flare across the country.

Dr. Matt Laytons is an early adopter of new and successful ideas to treat drug addicts.

When high school senior Ava Sharifi gave a speech about tolerance and acceptance, she struck a nerve. Thousands watched her impassioned talk to fellow Lewis and Clark students on YouTube as national and local media provided a megaphone.

John Padula was doing his best to hold it together and display courage in the face of an unthinkable act of violence. The man he considered a mentor, father figure and close friend was in intensive care, his body riddled with bullet wounds.

Moments after a crushing last-second defeat that ended his storied Eastern Washington University college football career, Cooper Kupp kept his poise and perspective.

Every time a bell rings – at least in the hallways at Catholic Charities – a homeless person gets a place to live. This year, that’s been 73 vigorous peals. Seventy-three people who have gone from the streets to a permanent apartment. At this rate, Rob McCann figures, street homeless in Spokane could become largely a thing of the past.