This wonderful article from the latest issue of Arches magazine details the Zinna Linnik Project, Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood, professor Monica DeHart’s contributions to that effort, SOAN alumnus Maggie Tweedy (2010) and her thesis project, student Mushawn Knowles (class of 2020), and quite a bit more! The first few paragraphs are here — then just follow the link to Arches for more.

A park project in Tacoma empowered underserved kids and gave them a safe place to play. When one of those kids turned up at Puget Sound a decade later, he showed that human connection is stronger than the lines that divide us. It was Mushawn’s idea to build the garden. He was proud of that. His fifth-grade class had been invited to help design the empty park next to their school, and while the other kids were dreaming up slides and swing sets, spray grounds to run through on hot summer days, monkey bars and mosaic tiles, Mushawn Knowles ’20 told the landscape architecture students who were creating the park model that he wanted to fee the homeless and hungry.

Mushawn Knowles (2020) and Maggie Tweedy (2010)

This was not an abstraction for a kid growing up in the Hilltop, Tacoma’s most underserved neighborhood—Mushawn had neighbors and friends in mind. So when he saw the garden sketched into the design plans for McCarver Park, it was a turning point for him. “I saw that I had a purpose, something that was bigger than me,” he says now, nine years later. “When I saw my idea manifest—that was empowering.”

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