Mel S. Jackson, 59, was the Millionaire Club Charity's executive director from 1996 to 2001. During his tenure he strengthened the 80-year-old organization's work on behalf of the homeless and destitute, serving meals and arranging for day-labor employment. He also spurned offers by condo developers to buy its Western Avenue building in order to help kick poor people out of an increasingly upscale Belltown neighborhood. "To think we can push the homeless into the woods is not an option," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999. Last year, he wrote a Seattle Times guest editorial about the continuing need for homeless advocacy: "The city has done a tremendous job in the past six years by doubling funding for shelter space, transitional housing and health care for the homeless. Private charity has stepped up to the plate and is spending $40 million to build transitional housing in the surrounding counties. Nevertheless, an estimated 2,000 people sleep outside every night. Men, women and children bed down behind billboards, under bridges and in alleys. Many of the children are out of reach of those agencies charged with their well-being and protection; the sick and disabled and recently arrived are unaware of the support services available to them." Jackson left the Millionaire Club last year to become Dean of University Relations at Antioch University's Seattle branch. He had previously worked for the City of Tacoma (as city manager and human development director) and Bates Technical College, and was a volunteer director and/or fundraiser for over a dozen nonprofits (including three decades' work as a trustee for the Children's Home Society of Washington). His ex-wife Leilani told the Times, "He was always an advocate for the people no one else cared about. He could relate to people in poverty. He saw their worth." Jackson died June 21 from cancer.

Jack Zeran, 54, was a teacher in the Bellevue schools for 28 years. In the mid 1980s he invented and marketed It's Your Future, a package of life-skills lessons (on such topics as finding a job, paying bills, and making health-care decisions). He sold the lesson kit to hundreds of schools, community colleges, prisons, and social-service agencies around the U.S. and Canada. He later repackaged some of It's Your Future's lesson points into Struggle, a board game he sold through Nordstrom stores from 1988 to 1996. As an Eastside Journal article described the game, "Players drew cards from 'Up' and 'Down' piles and tried to accumulate as much money and as many points as they could. The winner was not determined until the final play of the game." Zeran died June 28 from natural causes at a retirement residence in Tucson, AZ.

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