BECU expands with new location in White Center.

The 2025 GeekWire Awards Geeks Give Back honorees, from left: Chaitra Vedullapalli, Aviel Ginzburg and Emer Dooley.Being part of a community is what the GeekWire Awards are all about — the chance to come together to celebrate Pacific Northwest tech innovators and entrepreneurs and their successes over the past year.The honorees in the Geeks Give Back category are part of the reason there is a community, especially one that helps to make space for more people in tech, to help turn ideas into startups, and to continually work to strengthen the ecosystem that makes everything thrive.The recipients this year are Aviel Ginzburg, the entrepreneur and investor who is a general partner at VC firm Founder’s Co-Op and who helped create Foundations, a new community for tech founders in Seattle; Chaitra Vedullapalli, founder and president of Women in Cloud, which helps women-led businesses get resources to succeed in cloud computing; and Emer Dooley, site lead for the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Washington, a nonprofit that runs startup accelerators across the world.The Geeks Give Back category is presented by BECU.The GeekWire Awards will recognize nearly 50 finalists and honorees across a dozen categories, from Startup of the Year to Next Tech Titan. Winners will receive their coveted robot trophies live onstage on April 30 at Showbox SoDO in Seattle. Individual tickets are now on sale. Grab a seat here!Keep reading to hear from this year’s Geeks Give Back honorees in their own words about how to build and sustain successful communities. Responses edited for brevity and clarity.FoundationsAviel Ginzburg. (Founders’ Co-op Photo). “From my perspective, you don’t build community, you nurture it