When Vicky Navarro meets community members at the resource fairs she organizes, she said people are often surprised how much help is available.

From free phones to foot health to rent assistance to transportation vouchers, there are many programs available in the community for many different needs.

The problem is that many programs have little funding for outreach, and getting the right information to the people who need it is a challenge in general, especially in an era of information overload.

When people don’t get access to these resources, they can miss out on stabilizing support that could keep them from homelessness, provide self-sufficiency or other dire needs, she said. Programs can also lose funding if not enough people sign up because that can be seen as a lack of need in the community even if the need is there.

This is where people like Navarro come in. For the past several years, she has focused her community work on volunteering to organize resource fairs and becoming a bridge between people and resources, meeting people where they are at and acting as a force multiplier to elevate outreach for resource programs throughout South King County.

“From social media, from email, from in person, from the radio show … we are trying to highlight all the programs and events so that we can make sure that everyone has access to these resource fairs, or to the programs and services,” Navarro said. “That’s what my main focus, too, is the equal access to get to those resources.”

While she has been doing community work for over 15 years, everything changed during COVID. She became a community liaison for King County Public Health and also connected with the Promotores Network, where she met organizers and learned from mentors.

The Promotores Network meets monthly to learn from one another, share resources and discuss community needs.

“I learned to help families with a lot of things, from people who lost jobs, from people who lost loved ones, people who are losing their homes, businesses … we had to be the resources. We had to be the connector,” Navarro said. “We had to be there. We had to build trust and see where we can find support for them during these challenging times.”

In December 2024, she started a nonprofit called Building Beyond Communities to formalize and expand her community work.

Her passion for community comes from both seeing her mother’s strong community leadership in the Filipino community growing up, and also from being on the receiving end of resources when she needed them most.

“My small boys had a speech delay, and I was one of those where I didn’t know how to navigate myself, where to go,” Navarro said. “My kids needed to get connected with other kids because that’s one of the reasons why they were not speaking … I just walked into a Head Start program and I said, ‘Oh, can you help my kids?’ And they did.”

Through that first step of reaching out, she found out about a program that provided home visits to support her children’s speech needs.

Now Navarro has become that person who connects people to services. For her work to build bridges between supportive programs and the people who need them, Vicky Navarro is the Federal Way Mirror’s Hometown Hero for August.

Navarro is also involved in many other ways, including her role as a co-host of the FIL-AM RADYO program on local community radio RainerAvenueRadio.world. There she interviews artists in a mix of Tagalog and English, and has her own segment where she shares community resources.

For each resource fair, she focuses on bringing both a wide range of resources and also making sure that they are relevant to the community the event is for. She also encourages people to come to these events whether they need help or not, and to find local organizations to support.

She wants people to “really get involved in the community, because maybe you know someone who might need support down the road … you may not be the one who needs it, but someone else can. You never know, you might be able to help someone,” Navarro said.

She is also the interim program director for the City of Seven Lakes Association of Washington and is on the Community Advisory Group for Public Health Emergency Preparedness. She’s also served as a Hopelink Community Transportation Navigator and in general focuses on environmental stewardship, overdose prevention, work equity to ensure access to resources and fostering strong community partnerships.

Navarro has lived in Federal Way for the past decade, and her work focuses mostly on South King County, although it has recently begun to expand to other nearby counties.

She’s currently busy with back-to-school resource fairs and is excited to be building more relationships in Federal Way specifically.

Her next community resource fair in Federal Way will be from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Sept. 5 at the Family Life Center, located at 32275 32nd Ave. S. This one is being held in partnership with local organizations Lori’s Closet and Black Equality Coalition, and is part of her continuing role as a community liaison for KC Public Health.

“I can’t change the world, but we can together one day at a time,” Navarro said.