COMPASSIONATE
Las Vegas
Compassionate City Awards 2025
A compassionate city thrives when its people actively care for each other and their community. Through the Compassionate City Awards, we highlight individuals making a lasting impact across eight priority areas.
• Climate Reslience & Environmental Sustainability
• Education
• Health and Wellness
• Housing Security
• Human Trafficking
• Strengthening the Family
• Restorative Practices
Congratulations to the 2025 recipients.
8 News Now
Las Vegas honors community heroes for their impact and service
Nicholas Sommer and Stephanie Overton
Meet the 2025 Recipients
Latoya Holman
Education
Compassion means showing up consistently - not just in crisis- with time, resources, and deep listening. It shifts from transactional aid to transformational investment, centering the voices of those most affected. Compassion navigates power imbalances to advocate fiercely, even when unheard. It’s not soft; it’s radical, resilient, and rooted in justice - seeing people fully and acting boldly without losing sight of our shared humanity.
Pauline van Betten
Climate Resilience & Environmental Sustainability
Environmental compassion is the deep care and empathy a person feels toward the natural world, understanding that nature is not just a resource to be used but a living system that deserves respect, protection, and stewardship.
It means feeling a sense of moral responsibility not just toward people, but also toward ecosystems, wildlife, rivers, forests, and even future generations who will inherit the Earth.
It’s compassion in the true sense: seeing the suffering of nature (pollution, destruction, extinction) and feeling moved to act, not out of obligation, but out of love and connection.
Katherine Anderson
Health & Wellness
Compassion is about being able see a need in a community such as the special needs community and being able to use your passion and knowledge in order to help create an environment of positivity and inclusion.
“Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.” -Dalai Lama
Russell Smethers
Housing Security
Compassion means giving yourself a hand-up to someone else. To be concerned about someone else and actually try to help. Being a "Trekkie" and with my ministry focusing on outreach, it would be "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one," a quote Mr. Spock often says in Star Trek. To me, it means that the needs of those around me outweigh my needs.
Kim Harvey
Human Trafficking
I define compassion as being aware of, sensitive to, and responsive to the needs of others, particularly those in vulnerable situations.
Robert Bush
Restorative Justice
Compassion is the active commitment to recognize suffering in others and find the need and fill it. It means channeling empathy into strategic action while maintaining an unwavering dedication to justice.
Maria Tucker
Strengthening the Family
Compassion is love in action.
"It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life- a sense of purpose, happiness and hope- are most easily attained by giving them to others." - Isabel Allende
