Investing in a community’s children is promoting future leaders, voters, laborers, thinkers, dreamers, and inventors. Joyce Sobel exemplified this philosophy through a lifetime of focus on early education.

From her early days working in schools in Kenya with the Peace Corps to adding her voice to Head Start to running the San Juan Island Family Resource Center, she left an indelible mark in the hearts and minds of islanders.

In a world consumed by political division, natural disasters, mass shootings and war we have to pay attention to the individuals fighting every day to make the world just a bit better.

Too often we turn on the radio, open a newspaper, roll down our social media feed and find desperation, outcry and chaos at every turn. We feel impassioned and outraged, but then we finish our cup of coffee and go about the rest of the day with a sense of helplessness hanging off our shoulders. What can you do?

You can join a community, you can get to the heart of local issues and you can use your voice, your time and your energy to solve problems.

We cannot end tsunamis and hurricanes, we cannot eradicate poverty and violence, but we can improve education and health care thus paving the way for another generation to have better success than the last.

Only when you become part of a place can you hope to change it. Joyce Sobel is the finest example of making the world better by using her efforts at home. We urge all of our readers to follow in her footsteps and make each step count toward a better future.