Bringing Joy to Her Community

As the eyes of the soccer community turned to North America for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Seattle took center stage as one of 11 U.S. host cities. Lumen Field hosted six matches, including the United States’ Round of 16 loss to Belgium on July 6 that ended the team’s World Cup run. Just a mile away, Waterfront Park hosted free watch parties for 10 matches, drawing a single-day record of 84,767 visitors on June 19—a festive mix of soccer fans and Juneteenth celebrants.

That diversity gets to the heart of Waterfront Park, which has been described as Seattle’s “front porch” since its opening last September. The new urban park offers 180-degree views of the primeval Olympic Peninsula and the equally breathtaking Mount Rainier. The Waterfront Park Promenade invites visitors to explore the waterfront along elevated walkways and restored piers.

For Joy Shigaki ’94, however, building a beautiful urban park was only the beginning. For the past four years, Shigaki served as president and CEO of the nonprofit Friends of Waterfront Park. With the support of her board, she guided Friends through the completion of a $172 million campaign for the $806 million project while shaping the young organization around partnership, community building, cultural programming, and connection to place. 

The finished park is a mile-long, 20-acre space featuring lush gardens and plantings, an elevated Overlook Walk, a beach, play spaces, permanent art installations, bike lanes, and the revitalized Pier 58 and Pier 62, home to everything from fitness classes to local vendors.

“‘If you build it, they will come’ is a false mantra,” Shigaki says. “The question is, who are you building it for? As cities across the country are investing in new urban parks, how do we create an inclusive, welcoming, and safe public space for locals—especially communities of color and other marginalized groups that don’t always feel that sense of belonging? This is what makes the work of Friends important and relevant.”

To that end, Shigaki and her team work alongside community organizations, businesses, and artists to create free programming featuring Indigenous culture and history along with festivals, performances, and recreational programs that highlight the diversity of Seattle. “You have to be intentional,” Shigaki says. “You have to build trust. You have to build programming that reflects the communities you want to see there.”

Shigaki didn’t set out to create inclusive public spaces. After graduating from Occidental with a degree in American studies, “I wanted to be a social worker to empower young people, and be of service to my community,” she recalls. “Things evolve and opportunities came into my path. I’m very much a big-city person, and one thing that has always been at the center of everything I’ve done is working for social and racial justice and investing in solutions to big-city issues.”

Her senior comps examined the Japanese American experience during World War II. Shigaki’s research deepened her understanding of her own family’s and community’s history: Relatives had been forced from their homes and livelihoods in Seattle and spent more than three years and five months at Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center. Nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans lived in cramped, tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. They were prisoners in their own country with no due process.

“It was so formative to my worldview given the grave injustice, but also the resilience of my ancestors,” says Shigaki, a fourth-generation Japanese American (Yonsei) and Seattleite. “Occidental gave me the space to keep exploring my history and sharing my experience with other students. This included being shaped by other social movements locally and internationally and seeing the connections in our collective struggles for liberation and justice.”

“Joy stood out as an extraordinarily able, dynamic, and well-rounded student, with unusually good judgment for one so young, especially on issues related to social justice,” recalls her adviser, Xiao-huang Yin, professor of East Asian studies and special adviser to the president on Chinese initiative. “I still remember clearly how she argued passionately and persuasively for the rights of immigrants to pursue happiness in our class debate on the changing view of the American Dream.”

Before returning to Seattle, Shigaki was director of campaign and fundraising initiatives at Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, raising $103 million for the Presidio Tunnel Tops campaign. (The 14-acre park, which connects the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, opened in 2022.) Earlier, she spent a decade in senior fundraising leadership roles with the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City and Coro New York Leadership Center. She also led the campaign to establish the Wing Luke Museum’s first permanent home. 

Waterfront Park is one of the most consequential public spaces in the Emerald City since the construction of Seattle Center for the 1962 World’s Fair. For more than six decades, sweeping views of the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges, as well as Elliott Bay and Puget Sound, were blocked behind the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a double-decker elevated highway, which literally and figuratively cut off Seattle from its waterfront. 

After more than 15 years of public discussion, planning, and design, construction began in 2018. The multifaceted effort involved tearing down aging infrastructure, rebuilding a damaged seawall, rerouting traffic underground, and creating the park above the new roadway. Then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the project’s momentum. When Shigaki was named president and CEO of Friends of Waterfront Park in September 2022, a new narrative was needed.

“We had to become storytellers, to capture people’s imagination and help them see themselves in this new space,” she says. That meant showing up at community meetings, business forums, and cultural events. It meant cultivating relationships with local organizations, artists, donors, and residents. And it meant inviting them to help shape the park. The message got through: The park’s opening drew 50,000 people. 

As director of community engagement for the Gates Foundation, which contributed $15 million to the Waterfront Park project, Amy Carter P’27 worked closely with Shigaki over the last four years. Shigaki ably managed the “staggering complexity of a public-private partnership in a city known for its challenging, at times overwrought, planning and execution processes,” says Carter, whose son, Will, is a religious studies major at Oxy.

“Joy balanced public and private fundraising, opinions, construction timelines, and many invested parties, never losing her cool or optimism that it would all happen—and in time for Seattle to have its moment on the world stage as a host city of the World Cup,” Carter adds. “She is the epitome of servant-leader.”

Growing up in Seattle, Shigaki fondly remembers enjoying picnics featuring her mom’s rice balls and chicken at Discovery Park, running wild while her dad played softball at Rainier Playfield, and gathering for birthday parties and community events at Seward Park. As she embarks on a sabbatical that will include rest, travel, hiking, making ceramics, spending time with family and friends, and perhaps taking some dance classes, she looks forward to making new memories in the park to which she devoted the last four years.

Looking ahead, she says, “I’ll definitely work again. My calling in the world has been about living my values and bringing my unique approach to leadership to a range of generational projects. My hope is that I’ve left the places I’ve lived—and the communities within them—better and more deeply connected.”

(Photos courtesy Friends of Waterfront Park.)