On May 19, 2026, Quynh Pham was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the Seattle City Council as Director of the City’s Department of Neighborhoods (DON). Many in the Chinatown International District know Pham for her years of work with neighborhood organizations like the Friends of Little Sài Gòn and the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda).
Pham graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in American Ethnic Studies. She found her way to SCIDpda first as a volunteer, then as an intern, then as a full-time Community Economic Development coordinator.
“I knew I wanted to work with people,” she said. Her scope eventually expanded into Little Sài Gòn, where her first major project was the renovation of Donnie Chin International Children’s Park. That park became the launching pad for everything else: stakeholders who came together around the project continued meeting, a neighborhood vision emerged, and Friends of Little Sài Gòn was born.
It was during those early years at SCIDpda that Pham first encountered the Department of Neighborhoods. Her organization received a Neighborhood Matching Fund grant, and through that portal, she learned about PACE — the People’s Academy for Community Engagement. This DON program is designed to help everyday residents understand how Seattle’s city government works. She applied and got into the very first cohort in 2012.
“It opened my eyes to the complexities and the human side of government,” Pham said. “I never grew up understanding government. As an immigrant, I reaped some of its benefits but never thought about how those things worked in the background.” But things started to click, from the differences between legislative and executive branches to how policy gets made. “It provided foundational knowledge about policymaking that informed how I worked with the City in my nonprofit role.”
Pham spent half a decade at SCIDpda before the work grew heavy in a way that community workers recognize; the weight of being deeply embedded in the same neighborhood you are trying to help. She enrolled in Seattle University’s Master of Public Administration program and spent a year as a fund development manager at the Vietnamese Friendship Association in Columbia City. But she never fully stepped away from Little Sài Gòn. When the city announced plans to site the Navigation Center shelter in the neighborhood, Pham was back on the phone with city officials, organizing meetings, and coordinating the community response.
“It sparked a new energy in me,” she recalled.
In 2017, the FLS board asked her to become executive director. Her first reaction: “I think you’re crazy.” But somehow, she said, they convinced her. She went on to lead the organization for nearly a decade, steering it through some of the most consequential fights the neighborhood had seen: the Navigation Center debate, a community safety and behavioral health crisis, Sound Transit’s expansion, and more. Throughout all of it, she operated as an advocate, someone whose job was to push institutions and demand more from them.
That job description has now changed.
“One thing I have to remind myself is that I am now part of the institution,” Pham said of her new role in the Department of Neighborhoods. “As much as I want to be that same advocate, it’s not the same.”
What she carries with her is the habit of asking a question that city departments don’t always stop to ask: how does this actually affect communities?
“Coming in, I believe our city can’t just listen,” Pham said. “We need to help shepherd things across the finish line. If we’re going to resource people to do things, we should also help lead it.”
That philosophy extends to how she thinks about cultural identity and neighborhoods. “Cultural identity is not an amenity or a benefit,” she said. “For many of our communities, it’s foundational. It’s the reason people are engaged and active.” She sees a common thread across the city’s many neighborhoods. “We all want the same things: belonging, healthy neighborhoods, an ecosystem for our businesses, our families, our lives. The outcomes are similar. How you get there looks different for each community.”
One of Pham’s central goals is solving a problem that has quietly followed the department for years: What is DON’s primary role, exactly? Even people inside the city government sometimes aren’t sure. Its portfolio covers neighborhood matching funds, historic preservation, P-Patches, civic engagement, and community safety contracts — a range that can look from the outside like an assortment of unrelated programs.
But Pham sees the thread.
“These are all program ideas that came directly from community,” she remarked. “DON’s role is to shepherd capacity for community leadership, to elevate voices of community within the City. The power is within the community. We just help on the back end to keep the ship sailing forward.”
Her goal for the next three and a half years is specific: she wants every room where DON has a seat to have a clear answer to why the department is there. “I want people to say: ‘DON is here because of this reason. They have a critical role in this work and this project.'”
Fourteen years ago, she sat in a city program trying to understand how government worked. Now she is responsible for making sure it works for everyone else.
Evelyn is a writer and community organizer based on Coast Salish lands. Evelyn has 8 years of experience in government and currently works for King County. In their free time, Evelyn can be found singing karaoke and watching anime.
