Dr. Jessica Salvador, Belonging by Design: Building a Community Where Everyone Can Thrive
Across the country, communities are navigating increasingly complex realities shaped by shifting immigration policies, rising costs of living, and growing cultural and political divisions. These challenges affect not only immigrant families, but the health and resilience of our communities as a whole. In the West Salish/Puget Sound region, more than 18,000 immigrants call this area home. They contribute as workers, entrepreneurs, neighbors, parents, and community leaders while often navigating significant barriers to opportunity, including language access, legal complexity, healthcare access, and economic insecurity.
 
Join Dr. Jessica E. Salvador, Executive Director of the Kitsap Immigrant Assistance Center (KIAC), for a conversation about what it means to build belonging by design. Drawing from her lived experience as the child of immigrants and her work, Dr. Salvador will explore how communities can move beyond simply welcoming newcomers to intentionally creating systems, relationships, and opportunities that allow everyone to thrive. Through stories, insights, and examples from KIAC’s work, this presentation will examine how belonging strengthens communities, why it matters for all residents, and what we can do together to build a more connected and resilient Kitsaps.

Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine founding editor, Suquamish Foundation board member, and former member of the Bremerton Race Equity Advisory Board will be our speaker.

Some of us here in Kitsap County have arrived recently. Some have been here since time immemorial. Some of our ancestors crossed an ocean by steamer or plane, or crossed the southern border on foot. Understanding our diverse histories, righting old wrongs, and showing up for our neighbors could be the first steps in getting along — not just politely, but well.

Sarah van Gelder will look at current questions affecting us here in Kitsap County, like what it means to show up for our tribal neighbors, immigrant coworkers, friends, and local business owners? To build respectful relationships with the Native peoples who have called this place home for thousands of years? To honestly reckon with the divides that have long disadvantaged Kitsap’s African American community?

She’ll draw on her work as a local organizer and as a researcher and writer to explore what it means to be a good neighbor — honest about the past, and focused on what’s possible now. She’ll offer a way forward rooted in mutual respect, a shared understanding of history, and the kind of community that makes all of us more resilient.

Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent who covered the historic upheaval that ended the Cold War in an award-winning, 35-year career with Associated Press and Los Angeles Times.

She chronicled the USSR’s brief era of hope for reform and the tragic consequences of its failure. She followed Eastern Europe’s euphoric rebellions that toppled Communist tyrants from Berlin to Bucharest. In Yugoslavia, she documented the rise of ethnic and religious nationalism fanned by corrupt leaders who pushed their people into devastating wars. Her dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine traced those conflicts to unresolved disputes from their days of imperial oppression.

THE IRON CURTAIN CHRONICLES is a fictionalized trilogy recounting historical events of the last decade of the Cold War, told through the work of a young news agency correspondent. 

Join us as Carol discusses her book, Dispatches from Moscow: Spies and Lies, with Interviewer, Melody Sky Weaver, Librarian and Community Services Director, City of Port Townsend.

Carol J. Williams is a graduate of the University of Washington and holds a journalist law certificate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband Ken Olsen, a retired editor, in Silverdale, WA.