Seattle News, Views, and Brews
Sep 9, 2026 · 28 min · 11 segments
After the deadly shootings at the Bite of Seattle in late July and over Labor Day weekend in Belltown, gun violence prevention is once again a top-of-mind concern for Seattle area leaders. So what…
Dominique DavisGuest
Brian CallananHost
[upbeat music] Dominique, before I get your thoughts about the Bite of Seattle and what happened there, I wanna make sure I put this in perspective.
Can you help people understand what Community Passageways is? Explain the organization, and I think more importantly, why you started it.
Community Passageways is a nonprofit organization dealing with issues that I seen our community having and grew up [laughs] having in the same community, right? I grew up in these same streets that we serve.
I grew up with the same s- issues and situations, and dealt with the same institutional racism and dealt with the same disparities, all the way from unemployment to navigating the streets in the community, to navigating violence in the community, to dealing with homelessness, and all the other factors that come along with being in the community, you know, that are underserved and marginalized.
But, uh, the main reason why I started it is as I got older and I started looking at different, [laughs] the way my life was...
... um, the way my friends were living their lives, seeing all the issues that we had to deal with, where we couldn't follow our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions.
I mean, I was really good at football, so I wanted to do that path and go down that path and have-
... all the opportunities to do it, and had the talent to do it, but just didn't lean into it because when you're in survival mode every day, you can't fulfill your dreams and your ambitions, right? You have to deal with surviving on a daily basis.
And all my friends that I was around, most of them were in the same predicament, and so we ended up in a very, very dark time when the crack epidemic hit, the war on drugs hit, different factors in our life hit.
And so as I got older and started coming into my adulthood and realizing that there's more that I wanna do for my community than just being in these streets, I wanted to start a program where we can actually help young people fulfill their dreams, their visions, and their ambitions with some help.
And I had to ask myself, "What did, what did I not have and what did my peers not have in our community and in our lives that coulda got us into a better position in life and put us in a s- in a place where we could be more successful?" And that's why I tried to start this organization, to create the village.
I wanted to have a new village, right? The village has been decimated by institutional racism and all kinda other structures, and we have to create our own village.
[upbeat music] Dominique, before I get your thoughts about the Bite of Seattle and what happened there, I wanna make sure I put this in perspective.
Can you help people understand what Community Passageways is? Explain the organization, and I think more importantly, why you started it.
Community Passageways is a nonprofit organization dealing with issues that I seen our community having and grew up [laughs] having in the same community, right? I grew up in these same streets that we serve.
I grew up with the same s- issues and situations, and dealt with the same institutional racism and dealt with the same disparities, all the way from unemployment to navigating the streets in the community, to navigating violence in the community, to dealing with homelessness, and all the other factors that come along with being in the community, you know, that are underserved and marginalized.
But, uh, the main reason why I started it is as I got older and I started looking at different, [laughs] the way my life was...
... um, the way my friends were living their lives, seeing all the issues that we had to deal with, where we couldn't follow our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions.
I mean, I was really good at football, so I wanted to do that path and go down that path and have-
... all the opportunities to do it, and had the talent to do it, but just didn't lean into it because when you're in survival mode every day, you can't fulfill your dreams and your ambitions, right? You have to deal with surviving on a daily basis.
And all my friends that I was around, most of them were in the same predicament, and so we ended up in a very, very dark time when the crack epidemic hit, the war on drugs hit, different factors in our life hit.
And so as I got older and started coming into my adulthood and realizing that there's more that I wanna do for my community than just being in these streets, I wanted to start a program where we can actually help young people fulfill their dreams, their visions, and their ambitions with some help.
And I had to ask myself, "What did, what did I not have and what did my peers not have in our community and in our lives that coulda got us into a better position in life and put us in a s- in a place where we could be more successful?" And that's why I tried to start this organization, to create the village.
I wanted to have a new village, right? The village has been decimated by institutional racism and all kinda other structures, and we have to create our own village.
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