Each year, the Memphis Flyer asks our readers to nominate the best and brightest young Memphians, so you can meet our future leaders. It’s always hard to sort through the many worthy nominees to pick the top 20. But that difficulty is balanced by the joy of meeting so many talented and caring young people. Without further ado, here is your 20<30 class of 2026.
Ivy K. Arnold
Video Producer, Youth Villages
During her time at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Arnold was involved with the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, and served as International Third Vice President of the organization. After school, Arnold started working for Higher Ground News and We Are Memphis. “I was making these creative stories about the love for corner stores and all these different things, because Memphis is a very cinematic place. It’s always been colorful. You never know what you’re going to see or experience, and we just have so much soul here.”
In 2021, she moved to Youth Villages, the Memphis nonprofit offering emotional, mental, and behavioral health services to at-risk young people. “One of many things that I love about the culture here at Youth Villages is that they truly support their staff,” Arnold says.
“My big love is for the arts,” Arnold says. With filmmaking, “You can combine all those loves for arts because every piece of the crew, whether it’s the actors or in front of or behind the camera, there’s a skilled art for it, and you can do all these creative things.”
…
Alana Dent
Media Strategist, Red Deluxe Brand Development
When she’s not working at one of Memphis’ premier marketing firms, Dent is winning Miss Shelby County 2025 and Miss Petite Tennessee 2026. She uses her platform to advocate for domestic abuse victims. “I no longer say I’m a ‘survivor.’ I say I’m an ‘overcomer’ of domestic abuse. When I was younger, I made a lot of wrong decisions and decided to hang around the wrong people. I lost who I was and just would allow the man in my life to do anything. That really shaped how I thought of myself at that time. I thought I wasn’t worthy of love. I thought that I wasn’t good enough. I thought I wasn’t pretty. Coming out of that is what really shifted me towards working with survivors and victims, because some people don’t leave until it’s too late.”
She recently published her second book, The Choice Architect. “I went through a lot of trauma, and of course, I did not make the right decisions. This book will walk them through steps to help them figure out how to make the right decisions for themselves and their future.”
…
Isabelle Dillard
Coordinator of Community Life, First Congregational Church
“I am a preacher’s kid,” says Dillard. “My mom is an ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church, so I really grew up with church almost feeling like a family business. You’re always the first one on site on a Sunday morning, or staying late, cleaning up. A lot of preachers’ kids end up resenting that over time, but I loved it. I love the atmosphere of church. At its best it can genuinely be a place where people live their lives together in a way that is grounding, truly supportive, and loving.”
She says the past year at her Cooper-Young congregation has been “kind of been a one-two punch of the military occupation of Memphis, and then SNAP benefits being put on hold and the federal government cutting funding. The need is rising, but the will of the community to help each other is also rising at an equal or even higher rate. We’ve seen a beautiful response to hunger issues from people.
“I’m certainly not the first person to say this, but if you pour your life into Memphis, it pours back into you, and I have really found that to be true.”
…
Patrick Greene
Architect, archimania
Greene’s architectural journey started at a Memphis College of Art summer camp, where he met his mentor, Tim Michael. “He took the time to speak with me, asked me how I was doing, and handed me his business card. Then I followed up on that conversation later on, when I was in high school, and archimania was nice enough to take me in and let me shadow them.”
Now, he’s designing new buildings in Memphis for the same firm. “That’s one of the most rewarding aspects about architecture, or any design discipline: You can witness the direct impact of your work on your community in real time. One of my favorite projects here was for Collage Dance Collective. Before I was on that project, I wasn’t familiar with them as an organization, but seeing how they’ve gone from such a small and compacted space in the Binghampton area, to giving them a space to where they can, no pun intended, dance and spread their wings and have more outreach with the youth in their community — it’s been so rewarding.”
…
Julia Le
Nurse, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital
“My parents immigrated here from Vietnam back in the eighties and the nineties,” says Le. “Growing up, I was the certified translator for my family. I went on a lot of different doctor visits and some hospital visits with my parents and my grandparents. I saw good healthcare workers. I saw the bad ones. I saw the ones that were bad on their bad days, and a lot of them did motivate me and inspired me into becoming one of the people who they would see on a good day. And I wanted to become a good nurse and then become a good provider for people to see in their healthcare journey.
“I’m also very proud to be a member of the Vietnamese American community here in West Tennessee. I love that we were able to create the Asian Night Market. I really am proud to be Vietnamese, and I very much appreciate and am grateful for my grandma and my parents for helping me learn the culture, the heritage, and the language. And I really want to introduce our culture to Memphis.”
…
Caitlin Lloyd
Communications and Outreach, Choices
Lloyd was a Bridge Builder when she was young, so she knew she wanted to work at Bridges after college. “That organization put a lot into me as a young person that helped develop my love for the city. I had this mindset of, I need to give back to this organization that gave so much to me.”
As the AmeriCorps Team Lead at Bridges, Lloyd led an annual summer conference where “…youth were challenged to invest in civic engagement, diversity, appreciation, and their relationship with Memphis, as well as the relationship with each other, which was really incredible.”
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Lloyd decided it was time for a change. “In college, I became a peer health educator, interned with Planned Parenthood, and got really passionate about sexual and reproductive health education,” she says. “I just knew that I needed to get into this work in some capacity.”
Not only does Choices offer birth full reproductive health services, “We’re the only freestanding birth center in the Mid-South, and we have a hundred percent success rate, which means no one has died in our care while giving birth — baby or birthing person. And that’s something to behold, because Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.”
…
Keili Morris
Teacher, Macon-Hall Elementary School
“I like to tell people my mom was pregnant with me her first year of teaching. I think I was naturally born to do this, because I mean, there I was!”
Morris got her baptism by fire when she started at Hickory Ridge just before the pandemic made schooling virtual. “I drove all around Hickory Ridge and dropped off school supplies. It was a lot of gas, but it was worth it, because also getting to meet my kids in person was a really big deal, since all they saw of me was behind the camera screen. They got to meet me and I got to give them a hug.”
At Macon-Hall, she started the school’s first cheer squad. “I just wanted something for the girls to have what I call a safe space. I’ve been cheering since I was five. I know for me, cheer really brought a lot of my friends. It taught me independence. It taught me a work ethic.
“I don’t do stuff to get honored or recognized. I do it because I want to see children, especially children of color, get to see someone like me and think, ‘Oh, I can do that too!’”
…
Dr. Rachel Perkins
Cancer Researcher, University of Tennessee Health Science Center
“I am very young in my position as an assistant professor,” she says. “I got this really cool opportunity to skip past the postdoc role and jump straight into being an assistant professor, doing my work, which was my passion, on cancer stem cells. So I guess I’d just like to say I’m really grateful, one, for this honor, and two, that UT Health Science Center took that chance on me and gave me the platform to take my passion and run with it.”
Her research on stem cells which appear to promote the growth and spread of malignant tumors holds the promise of new, more effective treatments. “If you can pull out these minor populations of cells from the whole tumor across many types of cancers, then maybe you can come up with a more broad treatment for patients who have already had drug-resistant disease.”
When she’s not in the lab, her volunteer work with Crosspointe Church in Olive Branch has led to painting murals in schools. “We would paint happy, motivational murals on each bathroom stall for underserved schools in our area, and it just kind of started growing and growing.
“For me, faith, family, and science is everything. I think that faith enhances science and science enhances faith.”
…
Briana Massey
President’s Ambassador, Christian Brothers University
As a graduating senior at CBU, Massey is the School of Arts representative with the Student Government Association. “With student government, I get a chance to be a player. I get to work with different groups of a council full of very influential people who have decided that they wanted to see a change. As the president of the Mu Epsilon chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, I get to be the front runner, the one who’s out in the community making decisions and bringing that back to my chapter. So I try to play the head role every time because it’s important to be a great leader. You must also be the best follower.” The psychology major, who plans on becoming a school counselor, learned leadership from her first job behind the concessions counter at Malco Theaters. Nowadays, she is the supervisor for the Paradiso and Powerhouse. “I love the movie theaters!” she says. Somehow, she also finds time to intern at the Memphis International Airport. “There are some times where I’m like, ‘This is crazy!’ But more than anything, I am passionate about what I’m doing, so I’m not signing up for things without the knowledge that I’m ready to give 110 percent.”
…
Tyara Moore
Special Assistant to the Division Director, Shelby County Health Department
The Special Assistant to the Division Director of SCHS is originally from Kansas. In school, she studied health and anthropology. “I had kind of a worldview of how to understand people, cultures and how to appropriately treat people in different cultures in the healthcare space.”
She was volunteering at a hospital when the pandemic hit. “They said, ‘We’re about to start navigating what it looks like to distribute vaccines to people in their cars.’ It really kind of opened my eyes up. What is this thing that I had never heard of that allows popups like this to happen and the community to come together and be able to provide resources to those that might not have been able to have ‘em upfront?”
Now, she’s the one organizing health fairs all over the county. “We just recently launched a podcast for the health department, which is funny because I feel like even though I work here, it’s been a way for me to even learn more about what we do.”
…
Clair Mulvihill
Vice President, Slingshot Memphis
When this Kansas City, Missouri, native first came to Memphis, she was looking for the kind of teaching position she had experience with. But her background in math led her to Slingshot Memphis. “We understand what is effective at fighting poverty, so we help increase resources towards what’s already working, and then we help improve areas or efforts that could be more effective,” she says. “Moving from teaching students to being in more of a managerial role, often I think a lot of that was transferable. In some ways I thought I was unprepared, and I’ve been surprised at how much teaching prepared me for this role and this type of work.”
Slingshot partners with 50 Memphis nonprofits to optimize their anti-poverty operations. “We do program evaluation and technical assistance for those organizations,” Mulvihill says.
How do you lift people out of poverty? “I would say one of the things that we see is a more integrated approach. So oftentimes people don’t just need one thing. I saw that closely firsthand in the education space and saw students have all kinds of needs that bleed into the classroom.
“If you’re on the cusp of poverty, where you don’t fall into what qualifies as ‘poverty level,’ it could take one thing that gets you there. It’s also really hard to come out of that. Economic mobility is difficult. Not only do we have one of the highest poverty rates, we also have one of the lowest economic mobility rates. People say it’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody else has cemented your boots to the ground.”
…
Dylan Patel
Real Estate Broker
“I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, and I’ve always had a fascination with buildings,” says Patel. “I figured it was just the right level of fulfillment and challenge to get into the real estate field.”
Patel started off in residential real estate, but found his niche when he moved into commercial.“I help a lot of local investors keep their money local. Memphis is like 50 percent investor owned, and a lot of those people are from out of state. I like to keep people locally owning properties that are local because I’ve seen the way some of these properties get treated when it’s an owner from out of country or out of state. It makes the city look bad. They don’t take care of it. No one’s happy about it. That’s not been something I really put out there that much, but it is a really big personal initiative for me to get regular people in Memphis to own their real estate again.
“Real estate is like a living organism. You can’t put it on a spreadsheet and expect that to tell the whole narrative. I want to build a city where Memphians own Memphis.”
…
Pragna Rajashekar
Editor In Chief, The Pulse Reports
This senior at White Station High School is working to keep journalism alive. “I founded The Pulse Reports, an international newspaper. It’s a joint organization with a parent company called The Caring Hands of Tennessee, which I also founded, that works to increase healthcare in Tennessee and Memphis specifically. When I was working in healthcare, I realized that a lot of the people we were helping were super interested in educational opportunities. They were reading anything they could get their hands on, studying it. Me and my friends were discussing ways to get educational opportunities out there. So we decided to create The Pulse, which is student-led and student-run. It’s free for anyone to read and we cover topics such as business, anything that you need to survive in our world.
“We are a Memphis organization, so at first we just stayed within the Memphis community. We were showcasing their artistic abilities and writing skills, and then we started getting submissions from people around the world. We got submissions from Texas, California, and then we got some from India and the U.K. The more that people started to discover us, the more inspired we got, because we were showing so many perspectives.”
…
Julian Rome
Memphis Inner City Rugby
How does a philosophy major end up bringing rugby to Memphis kids? “I went to the University of Memphis for undergrad. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, starting as an English major just because I liked books. Then I took a freshman intro to philosophy class that changed my life. I like grappling with deep questions. I think I came into college like a lot of 18-year-olds, not really knowing what life was about. I met some of the best friends I’ve had in my life in the philosophy community at Memphis.”
He discovered rugby when he was a tutor at the U of M. “I love the fast pace of it. Honestly, I’ve always been a big college sports fan, but I have ethical concerns about football. And one of the things that really impressed me when I started working at Memphis Inner City Rugby and being more involved with the middle school and the high school programs is the emphasis on safety with the coaches.
“I mentor people who have really different backgrounds from me. Most of them are student athletes, when I wasn’t. I feel like, as a mentor, what I get out of it is a great relationship. I get to learn something about some other part of life, get to help somebody through struggles that they might be having, and share my experiences and what I’ve learned.”
…
Syng Saikou
Musician
Syng Saikou’s singing career started when her kindergarten teacher asked her to sing a solo at her graduation.“My mom, she just used to sing around the house. She was real popular for singing. Most of my cousins and things like that, they play different instruments. Some of them rap, some of them act and things like that. So it’s in the bloodline.”
The R&B artist released Saikou Vol. 1 last summer. She is currently prepping her second album. Not content to stay behind the microphone, she recently branched out into acting. “I always was a part of the performing arts, whether that was singing, being on the step team, acting, stuff like that. I was never in a real full-blown production until this past year. So it’s kind of opened up a new path for me.”
In addition to starring in the upcoming film Emily’s Hand, she will be making her stage debut at the Hattiloo Theatre in March. “I feel honored to be a part of Memphis legacy, being a part of the lineup of people that are currently shaping Memphis culture.”
…
Charles Seaton
Artist Services Coordinator, Crosstown Arts
“It is pretty cliché to say I like music, but I really love the ability to connect with people, and I’ve never found a better medium than music to learn about a person, how they think and how they view the world,” says Seaton.
“In 2020 I was brought on at Crosstown Arts and essentially the goal of myself and our other teammates was to create some programs and initiatives that would benefit the music community.”
The first program Seaton tackled helped Memphis musicians get health insurance through the Church Health Center. The second was an education program. “I help artists understand what it means to own their music catalogs and how to take advantage of that ownership. So assistance with paperwork, registering their music for royalty collection, and then organizing that music in a way that would put them in a good position to license. Crosstown Sync is the baby of all three. We license music from Memphis-affiliated creatives to TV shows and movies, video games, you name it. Over the past about five or six years now, we’ve really been developing this musician and artist services team.”
Seaton doesn’t just work behind the scenes. You can catch him in the Hattiloo Theatre production of Dreamgirls through March 8th. “I think I want to build, or at least contribute to building, a Memphis that people want to stay in.”
…
Tierra “Star” Starks
Operations Support Specialist, YMCA of Memphis and the Mid-South
“Memphis was such a pivotal place for me. While it did have its experience on the ends of me growing up in more troubled areas, I grew up to learn and love the struggle of Memphis in a sense of being a contributor and a change agent to my community.”
At the YMCA, “What we really focus on is enhancing and creating programs that service the teen population. They kind of consider me somewhat like a computer because I think very strategically about how to make things more efficient and effective, in the sense of how we can optimize our resources as a nonprofit organization offering services on such a large scale.
“Being from Memphis, I mean, it is a unique experience indeed, but I truly do believe this city really built me differently in ways that I can’t imagine. I’ve seen so many walks of life, so many experiences, and it is my goal and my mission to be a part of translating those experiences into real learned experiences that really reform the mind. I think mental health is so important and I think that that is a real struggle that people my age all face. The type of city I want to build is authentic and genuine.”
…
Randy Truong
Community Impact Program Associate, Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Growing up, Truong never felt much affection for Memphis. Then she interned with Seeding Success, where an anti-poverty project called More for Memphis opened her eyes. “I saw these folks on the ground talking about how they don’t have public transportation to get to work, school, or doctor’s appointments. Their home is moldy. They have a third grade reading level, they haven’t finished high school, and there’s no way for them to get out of that situation. As a person who thought, ‘I don’t like Memphis,’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, somebody has to love Memphis!’”
Now she works for the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis. “Our mission is to make Memphis thrive with the power of philanthropy,” she says. “We have an endowment called the Forever Funds that we’re fundraising for, raising up to $50 million. We’re about at $25 million right now. Through that endowment, we’ll be able to continue grant-making for years to come without soliciting donors or fundraising. We’ll just have investments coming out of that endowment to give grants to Memphis nonprofits forever.
“I felt like I needed to stay here because I know my value. I know what I can bring, and I’m not afraid to push back. I want Memphis to get out of the small-think tank.”
…
Kynnedy Tuggle
Policy and Advocacy Associate, First 8 Memphis
Education is Tuggle’s passion. The Rhodes College graduate did time in the classroom as an ESL teacher before moving on to public policy roles, where she’s shaping the future of the classroom. “First 8 Memphis is an early care and education systems-level organization working to strengthen high-quality early learning opportunities and supports for children and families from prenatal through age eight in Memphis and Shelby County,” she says.
Her passion for education is not just academic. “As a single mom of two little ones, motherhood shapes how I see the world and truly informs everything I do. Though it can be challenging at times, it is important to me to actively participate in the community where my children are growing up. Being a mom has made me more passionate about my work, helping me understand how systems and policies can sometimes operate in silos, further reinforcing barriers for families.
“The Memphis I’m actively creating is one that truly prioritizes children and families — one in which dedicated funding and meaningful investments support families from the moment they are expecting children, ensuring access to high-quality early learning, healthcare, and resources that give every child a strong start in life.”
…
Kori van der Bijl
Nonprofit Consultant, MKDM
“I am a writer by trade,” says van der Bijl. “Storytelling is at the heart of everything I do and will always be at the center of what I do.”
But when she moved to Memphis with her boyfriend, “I was looking for a bit of a stretch.”
She got married at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, which led unexpectedly to a position as Membership Coordinator there. “I jumped right in feet first, and learned so much. I think one of the best ways to get to know Memphis was from being a part of the Dixon team.”
Eventually, she moved on to consulting and fundraising for nonprofits nationwide. “I think at the end of the day, most people don’t want you to look at them and see a number. Most people in the position to make philanthropic gifts, no matter large or small, have their own set of values. They have a ‘why,’ whether it’s a tax benefit or something more altruistic. Everyone has their own reasons. Finding that reason, understanding that reason, and making them feel seen and heard is always going to be more important than getting across what dollar amount you need on the front end.”
She admits that she’s fallen in love with her adoptive city. “I feel that it’s the type of place that catches you by surprise. It kind of creeps up on you. I love a good underdog story, and I think that’s exactly what Memphis is.”