Co-Presenter Spotlight: United Way of King County
September 23, 2025
SAL is proud to spotlight our co-presenter United Way of King County as we collaborate on our upcoming event with Timothy Snyder at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, October 26. UWKC focuses on building an equitable future, ensuring everyone in our community has access to housing, food security, educational opportunities, and financial stability.
Read more about their work and mission!
United is the Way: Freedom as Collective Responsibility
We live in a time when the idea of freedom is being contested on every front. Food assistance programs are being gutted while corporate profits soar. Rents rise faster than wages—pushing families to the brink—while tax cuts and legal loopholes pad the pockets of America’s wealthiest. These are not abstractions. They are choices—choices about who is free, who is not, and who holds the power to decide.
At United Way of King County, we believe freedom is more than barely scraping by; freedom is the chance to thrive. And every day, we work to offer our neighbors that freedom.
That is why we approach people with holistic care: ensuring children have breakfast before the school bell, delivering groceries to elders and families, supporting in- and after-school educational opportunities, offering free tax filing, helping post-secondary students graduate, and keeping people housed through rental assistance and eviction prevention. These are immediate lifelines, yes, but they are also investments in equitable freedom to learn, grow, and plan for tomorrow.
But philanthropy alone is not enough. We know that poverty, hunger, and homelessness are not accidents of individual circumstance; they are outcomes of systems designed to offer privileges to some while excluding others. That is why we pair direct services with the harder, deeper work of systems change, or tackling the root causes of inequity and dismantling the barriers that stand in the way of genuine opportunity. Through our advocacy team and work in Olympia, we’re fighting for a more equitable future.
This, too, is a struggle over freedom. As Timothy Snyder reminds us in On Freedom and On Tyranny, freedom is not merely the absence of government control. It is the presence of dignity, safety, and possibility in our daily lives. It is the ability to shape the future together—not as isolated individuals, but as a community bound by responsibility to one another.
Seattle Arts & Lectures has long convened voices that invite us to wrestle with the most urgent questions of our time. We are proud to stand alongside SAL in welcoming Timothy Snyder to Seattle, because his work echoes what we see every day: that democracy and freedom require sincere care and collective will.
This evening is more than an author’s talk. It is an invitation to act. To see our shared future as something we must build together, not an assumed inheritance. To stand united for a vision of King County—and a country—where every person has the freedom to access an equitable life.
Freedom, like justice, only expands when we insist on it together. United is the Way we’re building a better King County, and we hope you’ll join us in this work.