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Meet Lin.
Lin Yang grew up in Sammamish, and graduated from Eastlake High School in 2001.
Since his high school days, Lin has always believed in the power of bringing people together to solve problems. After seeing how Sammamish lacked opportunities for youth that were offered in neighboring cities, he led a community-wide effort to found the Sammamish Youth Board in 2001, giving young people a platform to influence City policy and advocate for more youth-focused amenities and services.
Lin speaking in front of Sammamish City Council in 2001 to advocate for the creation of the Sammamish Youth Board.
Lin graduating from Eastlake in June 2001 (posing with his mom).
That early experience in community organizing instilled in him a passion for public service. After college, Lin became a public school teacher in the Mississippi Delta as part of Teach for America. Since then, his career has taken him in fascinating directions. He served as a budget analyst for school districts, worked for many years as an international journalist, and held several strategic roles in the tech industry. He currently works at Microsoft as a communications director.
For Lin, Sammamish was always home, and through all those years, he dreamed of coming back to raise his own family. But when he returned home permanently in 2019, he found a community that was bitterly divided over the future of Sammamish; made worse by an information gap that resulted from the loss of our long-time community newspaper.
To give the community a credible source of news and a new voice, he started the Sammamish Independent in 2020, empowering local high school students with the skills to cover local news, and providing a venue for respectful discussion of the city’s top issues. Today, thousands of people read about local news and events from the Sammamish Independent each month, and its opinion pages are filled with interesting perspectives from across the community.
Two teen reporters from the Sammamish Independent moderated a City Council candidate forum in 2023. Lin is helping the candidates keep time in the bottom right.
Lin celebrates student journalism with young reporters and their families alongside Deputy Mayor Amy Lam at the Sammamish Independent’s annual summer gathering.
Lin and his wife, Kuan, are raising their two young daughters in the same house he grew up in. Like all parents, he wants Sammamish to remain a safe, nurturing, and inclusive place for families. His lifelong passion for community engagement, from founding the Sammamish Youth Board to launching the Sammamish Independent, has been driven by a belief that an informed and connected community is a stronger one.
Now, he wants to bring that same approach to City Council, focusing on transparency, thoughtful planning, and meaningful investments in the city's future. For Lin, a thriving city isn't just about policies — it's about the people who call Sammamish home. That's why he is running, to help Sammamish grow in a way that supports families across all stages of life, strengthens local businesses, and preserves our community assets for generations to come.
Lin holds a Bachelors degree in Public Policy from Cornell University, a Masters in Public Policy (MPP) from Harvard University, and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from UCLA.