Every week since 1993, Andrés Abreu has published El Vocero Hispano, the oldest and largest Spanish-language newspaper in West Michigan. Born in the Dominican Republic, he built a newsroom in Grand Rapids and has kept it reporting for thirty-three consecutive years, through every change in the news business, on the terms he started with: credibility, integrity, and service. The paper informs and guides its readers on the issues that reach their families and keeps the facts in front of the opinions. It has stood inside the community's campaigns against racism, discrimination, and the misuse of community resources, and the young communicators Andrés trained in his newsroom now report for NPR and Univision. Asked for his philosophy after sixty, he answered with Bertolt Brecht: there are those who fight for a year, those who fight for many years, and those who fight their whole lives, “and those are the indispensable ones.”

After she retired, Tyra Bradley started a foundation in the name of a family friend. Evelyn “Sally” Rusnell gave time and money to causes all over the area and never made a show of it, and the Sally Girl Foundation, which Tyra cofounded and leads from Sparta, works the same way. It raises money and collects supplies for young people in Kent and Ottawa counties who are homeless or have been trafficked, and it delivers them through the organizations those young people already trust. In 2023 that meant 200 pairs of winter socks, 100 pairs of gloves, 100 hats, 50 coats, and hygiene kits, distributed to AYA Youth Collective and to Sacred Beginnings, the survivor-led program founded by Leslie King, a fellow 2026 honoree. Tyra serves on the West Michigan Human Trafficking Coalition and teaches how trafficking works and how to recognize it. This year Sacred Beginnings named the Sally Girl Foundation its Organization of the Year. “When you provide a much needed winter coat to a youth who has nothing, and see the smile on their face, it says it all.” 

Jacqueline Brayman built the North End Wellness Coalition from scratch eleven years ago and still runs it without a payroll: twenty-five member organizations working the Creston and Belknap neighborhoods toward four goals residents named themselves, mental health, healthy eating, active living, and connection. The coalition laid out the North Quarter Pathways, an urban trail through the neighborhood; it publishes Fit For Free, a roster of free fitness classes; and with the Mental Health Foundation of West Michigan and Calvin University's nursing program it put mental health services, and plain talk about them, in front of the whole neighborhood. This June, Georgie's Farm Market opened on Plainfield Avenue with North End Community Ministry and the Creston Neighborhood Association: fresh produce at rock-bottom prices in a part of Creston designated as experiencing food apartheid, and a warm room to learn and talk in. Dan Butler, a fellow 2026 honoree, advised the market's plan for three years, and Derrick Collins, another, made the store usable for shoppers with disabilities. On the years after sixty, Jacqueline quotes George Bernard Shaw: “I want to be all used up when I die.” 

Dan Butler spent his corporate career as a senior executive managing large teams and multi-site operations through acquisitions and other hard transitions then formed his own company.  Since 2011 he has been giving that experience away. As a SCORE mentor, he has led more than 500 mentoring sessions in the past two years alone, over 600 hours of his own time, and the West Michigan chapter counts him as its top contributor. He takes SCORE into rooms it would not otherwise reach as its ambassador to the Urban League of West Michigan. Through Jandernoa Entrepreneurial Mentoring he advises executives whose companies are ready to grow. His clients are nonprofits as often as businesses; including a mid-sized law firm he has coached on leadership and expansion. At Trinity Lutheran Church he serves on the council and as liaison to its Outreach Committee, and he sits on the board of a nonprofit that serves families living with domestic abuse. “I am blessed to be able to offer help without compensation.”   

Derrick Collins came home to Grand Rapids in 2009, after the military, to serve the place he grew up. At Disability Advocates of Kent County he helps hundreds of older adults and people with disabilities a year reach assistive technology, housing, rides, health care, and Social Security benefits. In 2022 the agency's own numbers showed it was not reaching Black and Brown Grand Rapids. Derrick answered with the Black & Brown Community Partnership Breakfast, a quarterly gathering he founded and still hosts, and with weekly satellite hours inside the Pride Center, United Methodist Community House, the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan, and North Kent Connect; the numbers have moved since. A veteran himself, he volunteers at Heroes' Corner, the drop-in center founded by 2025 honoree Reginald Howard, and he serves on the board of The PROACTIVE Project beside Kathi Harris, a fellow 2026 honoree. One veteran, turned away everywhere else, was at the bus stop outside the office when Derrick caught up with him; together they got him his benefits, a job, and an apartment furnished from the floor up. “Do not let a number decide your life.” 

In 2013, Meijer asked Cathy Cooper whether an LPGA golf tournament would be embraced by the Grand Rapids community to help feed families and she said “I will figure it out and find a way.” The Meijer LPGA Classic for Simply Give played its first round in 2014, and twelve tournaments later it has sent more than $14 million to food pantries across the Midwest, Feeding America West Michigan and North Kent Connect among them; last year's event drew 1,400 volunteers and a record crowd. Cathy spent more than forty years at Meijer, growing from a store operations role to Senior Director of Community Partnerships and Giving, and in retirement she still runs the tournament as its executive director. Meijer gave her the first Fred Meijer Award in 2019, its highest honor for a team member, and the Better Business Bureau awarded her its 2025 Trust Award. She has served on the boards of Gilda's Club, the Better Business Bureau, North Kent Connect, Girl Scouts of Michigan Shore to Shore, the American Heart Association, Conductive Learning Center and the Michigan Heroes Museum, and she helped plan and execute the 2025 Greatest Generation Celebration. Her father served on the Senior Neighbors board when she was growing up and she has fond memories of that."I am thriving in a renewed way” as I continue to work in our great community. 

Andy De Vries grew up on the West Side and spent the summers of the 1950s at Valley Field, where Satchel Paige and Al Kaline once played, so when he found the 1937 ballpark falling apart from misuse and disuse, he found some friends and started a nonprofit. Fans of Valley Field, which he cofounded and leads, are all volunteers. In four years, it raised more than $5 million from more than 1,600 donors, and the restored field opens for good in 2027. Andy has been a Grand Rapids Rotarian for 35 years, a past president and assistant district governor, and the founder of STRIVE, the club's mentoring program for city high school students, now thirty years old. He has served 29 years as president of the Grand River Preparatory High School board, mentored more than 50 college students, refereed soccer for fifty years, and given Ottawa County's parks commission twenty years; it named a room at Hager Park for him. Rotary's motto is his North Star. “Service Above Self.”

Max Gibbs joined the board of the Roger B. Chaffee Scholarship Fund 53 years ago and has not left. He packs sack suppers at Kids' Food Basket every week and serves lunch every week at Matthew's House. He advises The Salvation Army through its advisory board, its Kroc Center council, its Adult Rehabilitation council, and its Little Pine Island Camp council; sits on the Grand Rapids Public Schools Foundation's grants and finance committees; and serves the boards of Steepletown, St. Francis Garden, and the Grand Rapids Public Museum, and the city's Parks and Recreation and Urban Forest councils. He joined the Girls Choral Academy's campaign because he wants more girls to have what it gives. In June, Kids' Food Basket unveiled a volunteer garden Max established in memory of his wife, along with a fund that lets the organization add one more school to its sack-supper routes. His nominator says he does all of it with a warm heart and a twinkle in his eye. “Giving is better than receiving. Give of your time.”   

The PROACTIVE Project's storefront sits at 347 South Division, a few doors from the Senior Neighbors center downtown, and Kathi Harris keeps the door open. Fifteen to twenty people a day walk in for help with a housing application, a job search, a replacement ID, an insurance letter, a warm coat, or a chair out of the cold; some are older neighbors from down the block. Kathi founded PROACTIVE in 2004 as a nonpartisan coalition and leads it today as executive director, and its first work is still voter education: door-to-door outreach in the precincts of Grand Rapids, Kentwood, Wyoming, and Muskegon where turnout runs lowest, candidate forums, rides to the polls, Democracy Block Parties, and Rollin' Our Souls to the Polls. More than 300 volunteers and 25 partner organizations worked the last election with her. One resident who had never voted, convinced the system was not built for people in their neighborhood, registered after a few of PROACTIVE's community conversations and now volunteers at the outreach events. “Keep praying and keep moving.” 

"A Girl Scout attending Carl Johnson's woodworking class starts building her birdhouse by timidly tapping her first few nails and finishes by "wailing away" at the birdhouse she built by herself and proudly takes home." Since 2017 Carl has taught more than sixty woodworking workshops for Girl Scouts of Michigan Shore to Shore and other young people in Grand Rapids, more than 400 of them, each class planned so a scout goes home with a badge, a toolbox or birdhouse, and the know-how to measure, cut, and handle a tool safely. Troops drive in from across the state. With one troop he designed and built feeding perches for birds recovering at a local rescue; with another, a Little Free Library beside a school. An engineer and science teacher who later worked in community development and technology management on three continents, Carl also mentors high school students weighing careers and trades, and as a Certified Urban Forester he has led volunteer tree-planting crews and served on the city's parks and urban-forestry advisory boards. “The adults who invested time in me when I was young helped shape the course of my life.”

Leslie F. King is a survivor of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. She was coerced into the lifestyle of prostitution at the tender age of 15 in Grand Rapids, MI. She became trapped in the underworld of prostitution and drug addiction for over 20 years. On July 4, 2000, Leslie miraculously found the strength and the courage to break free. Since 2003, she has been intensely engaged in working with individuals who find themselves trapped in the same horrors that she experienced. 

In 2005, Leslie utilized her experience, expertise, and inspiring example of a renewed lifestyle to open Sacred Beginnings, a safe haven that offers hope, and healing to trafficking victims. Leslie consults with law enforcement agencies, human service professionals, clergy, and others requesting direction and understanding in working with prostituted individuals. She also speaks at various conferences and academic institutions on the issue of human trafficking. 

Leslie is well-respected in the state of Michigan from which she hails and where she is often seen boldly conducting street outreach to sexually exploited people during unconventional hours. 

During the first treatment of her fourth cancer, Kathy Kooienga took her IV pole down the row of chairs at The Cancer & Hematology Centers and asked the other patients and the nurses what a snack cart ought to carry. What she heard was that the snacks mattered less than the talk. She built the cart herself. The Lemonaid Cart has rolled through the center since January 5, 2024, pushed by volunteers who have been through treatment themselves, and it has served more than 40,000 patients, family members, nurses, and doctors: snacks and puzzles, a warm blanket, a drink handed over so a nurse can stay at a bedside, and a story traded across the aisle. Kathy retired at seventy to run it full time. Meijer gave $10,000 to keep it stocked, and a second cart opened in Holland this June. Before the cart she owned an assisted-living home for fifteen years and spent twelve as an activities director; older adults, she says, are her first love. Her motto rides on the cart: “kickin' those lemons to the curb.”

Larry Louters has been setting fire to his own hands in front of fifth graders since 1989. The Sights and Sounds of Chemistry, the show he designed and has performed on his own time for 37 years, fills Calvin University's Gezon Auditorium many times each spring and summer with thousands of fifth and sixth graders a year, elephant's toothpaste and controlled explosions included, and he has always made a point of inviting the schools whose students are least likely to see a laboratory. Summer chemistry camps follow for the same age group. Larry taught and mentored biochemistry students at Calvin from 1984 until he retired in 2018, sending hundreds on to research, medicine, and dentistry; some come back after medical school to tell him they remember the demonstrations. He is training a new generation of chemistry professors to carry the show on, and he now serves as board president of the Calvin Academy of Lifelong Learning, where older adults take classes in any subject they like. “Any day where you can learn something new is a good day.” 

Michele McIsaac spent her career at Dwelling Place, Spectrum Health, Porter Hills, and now Mel Trotter Ministries, where as its Strategy Consultant, she is the person who gets philanthropists and impact investors into the same room and blends their gifts and loans into buildings that get built. Hope Village is the latest. Sixteen tiny homes on 1.65 acres on Garden Street SE, developed by Mel Trotter with Next Step of West Michigan on a $944,000 state neighborhood grant and $300,000 from the Lowe's Foundation, give people leaving homelessness a locked door of their own, a workforce program, and a path to a lease. The first home was finished in August 2025; by this May ten stood and eight neighbors had moved in, with the last six due by Christmas. Michele also serves on the Clark Foundation's Board of Trustees, where she chairs the Board Development and Governance Committee. Past a certain age, she says, there are only two things left to do: create pathways for the next generations, and boost them. “Life is going to pass fast. Make it a grand adventure.” 

When Tom Muszynski joined Care Resources in December 2006, the program served 18 participants. Since then, it has cared for more than 1,300 people, and Tom—a registered nurse who now serves as chief operating officer—has supported the program throughout its growth. Care Resources is a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), bringing together a day center, a clinic, and professionals from 11 disciplines to help adults age 55 and older continue living safely at home. In 2015, Tom helped the six PACE programs then operating in Michigan to establish the PACE Association of Michigan. Today, the association includes 15 programs across 24 sites. When Care Resources opened its new center in 2019, Tom designed a second entrance equipped with a shower, exam room, clothing, and laundry facilities. This thoughtful design allows participants arriving after a difficult morning to enter the day room with comfort and dignity. Tom also works as an Advocate to support funding for older adults, and he responds to caregivers who call feeling certain that no help is available. His coworkers affectionately call him the “PaceOsaurus.” His guiding principle is simple: “Don’t keep any knowledge to yourself.” 

In the early 1980's Jackie Taylor worked across this nation with other women in higher education to open doors for women leaders in college/university leadership.  She walked through several herself:  The first woman to serve as Vice President of Lansing Community College, then over the next 25 years she served as vice president, provost, and president of colleges, most recently as Vice President/Provost of Davenport University, building exchange programs that sent faculty staff and students abroad.   She currently serves as a leadership consultant with Pondera Advisors, and serves the Boards of Emmanuel Hospice, Brio Living Service the YMCA of Grand Rapids as an emeritus Trustee, the M.E. Davenport Legacy Committee, the Michigan American Council on Education, the Grand Rapids Rotary Club and its Foundation, as well as several committees at St. Mark's Episcopal church.  Grand Rapids Chamber has presented her the ATHENA Award; Michigan Women Forward its Trillium Award, and Grand Rapids Rotary its Fred Meijer Service Above Self Award, and she has been inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.  Lansing Community College, Aquinas College and Michigan State University each count her as a distinguished aluma.  Jackie would rather honor others than be honored, but is deeply appreciative.  She specifically enjoys mentoring students through the Rotary Global Scholar Program. Dr. Taylor's  Motto of Life is "Rise above it and move forward."