Here are the Des Moines Register's 2024 People to Watch

It's a Des Moines Register tradition to close out each year and open the next by introducing readers to 15 People to Watch — individuals expected to make an impact on Iowa in the coming year.

This year's nominations from readers and our journalists totaled nearly 60 people and posed hard decisions for staff members charged with winnowing them to just 15.

The final 15 include people in business and the arts, those who train the world-class athletes of the future, chefs on the cutting edge, farmers teaching refugees how to run their own farms, and people fighting for representation through cosmetics and medicine. We hope that you are as inspired by reading about them as we were in profiling them.

As we profile these amazing people, we will add links to articles about them on this page. In the meantime, you can read about the 2023 People to Watch and a where-are-they-now of past People to Watch.

Sam Applegate

The Burundi refugees Sam Applegate works with may be new at navigating this nation’s small business bureaucracy, but they’re old hands at farming. Working with the 70-acre In Harmony Farm that Applegate manages near Earlham, they grow well-known Iowa staples like potatoes, carrots and onions as well as treasured homeland specialties like African eggplant and spinach-like greens called lenga lenga.

Applegate's work to help refugees get established in farming in Iowa, using sustainable practices, and to expand the availability of locally grown food makes him one of the 15 Des Moines Register People to Watch in 2024.

More: In Harmony's Sam Applegate helps refugees build skills needed to run their own farms

Tim and Chloe Bratvold

The story of Highland Park and the Historic Valley Junction's newest real estate and entrepreneurial power duo began on a dating app. Chloe Bratvold had a background in restaurant sales, and Tim Bratvold is the director of business development for Estes Construction, and the pairing seemed predestined. Four years later, the couple were getting married, purchasing a storefront and opening a business, Candle Bar DSM, in Valley Junction.

Since Chloe Bratvold first opened up shop, she and her husband's property holdings have only continued to grow. Their ongoing work to renovate buildings in historic Des Moines metro neighborhoods has made them among the Des Moines Register's 15 People to Watch in 2024.

More: Developers Tim and Chloe Bratvold are building Des Moines neighborhoods and life together

Siriaco Garcia

Better known by his alter ego, "Siricasso," Siriaco Garcia channeled childhood pain into an adulthood spent painting. In his work, Garcia creates with a variety of mediums such as walls, shoes, T-shirts and sweatshirts. His work has ranged from paintings of rappers such as Tupac to colorful murals in his current home of Huxley.

Garcia plans to expand his presence throughout the state in what promises to be a breakout year, making Garcia one of the Des Moines Register's 15 People to Watch in 2024.

More: Siriaco Garcia overcomes a rough youth to become emerging star of central Iowa art world

Dickson Jensen

Jensen has a penchant for turning his passions into destinations. He opened The Harvester Club, an 18-hole golf course midway between Des Moines and Marshalltown, in 2000. Golf publications rank it among the best in the United States, and it is becoming a mecca for those serious about the game.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that another of Jensen’s passions ― coaching young people in basketball ― is spawning another destination development that's expected to open late next year. When completed, the $40 million Kettlestone Central Sports Complex in Waukee will have two buildings housing 12 full-sized indoor basketball courts, an outdoor court, stadium-style seating and parking for 1,000 cars.

More: Developer's hoop dreams are under construction: A national basketball destination in Waukee

Jassma’ray Johnson

Jassma'ray Johnson sells lip glosses, but that's just the start of her company. The next big project for Simply Sámone is to expand to body oils and lip liners. In the future, she'll offer foundation and eye products. If you order from her business in 2024, it’ll come in a Simply Sámone branded-package, a change from the standard shipping mailers she has used so far.

More: This ISU grad's cosmetic company lifts up Black women, pushes 'evolution' in beauty industry

Kathir Kalyanaraman

Johnston High School student Kathir Kalyanaraman, 16, received hundreds of laptop computers and handheld electronic devices and gave them to refugees and other immigrants across Iowa — efforts he wants to expand in 2024, maybe even out of state. He wants to show that “age doesn't determine how much impact you have on the community. You could be 70 years old, older or even younger than I am to really create an impact within the community.”

More: Johnston teen repairs hundreds of laptops and other devices, gets them to people in need

Ashlan Lippert

Lippert is the first social worker on staff at the Des Moines Central Library. Her work with the city's most vulnerable population is part of an effort to expand the library's role as a center of community resources, helping connect people to agencies across the city and metro area.

More: Des Moines library's first social worker is helping make it a center of community resources

Angela Mickens

Mickens has channeled her passion for helping those patients to efforts outside the operating room, becoming a prominent advocate for improved health outcomes for women of color in the metro. She she joined Black Women 4 Healthy Living, a local organization focused on addressing health disparities faced by Black women, and now is on the precipice of making notable change in the health of Black women across the Des Moines metro.

More: How Angela Mickens is helping improve the health of Black women across the Des Moines metro

Maanya Pandey

When Maanya Pandey learned that female prisoners often don't have access to basic hygiene products, she knew she had to do something about it.

That inspired her while still a student at Waukee High School to start a nonprofit, Love for Red, dedicated to making access to feminine hygiene products easier and more cost-effective.

But it wasn't until she started her senior year in high school in 2021 that she realized the issue of period poverty was happening at her school.

In 2024, Pandey, now a University of Iowa student, hopes to expand her efforts to end period poverty across Iowa, including pressing for legislation to make period products free in schools. That's why she's one of the Des Moines Register's People to Watch in 2024.

More: This Waukee graduate breaks taboos and tackles period poverty with Love For Red

Sara Hayden Parris

Sara Hayden Parris is the president and founder of Annie's Foundation, a volunteer nonprofit that strives to ensure students have access to challenged books as Iowa school districts strip their shelves of titles with sexual content or LGBTQ themes to comply with sweeping new laws that have transformed education in the state.

Hayden Parris' work reflects local organizing efforts to counter conservative influence over local school districts and blunt the impact of Senate File 496, which bans books depicting sex acts from schools and prohibits instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades. Republican legislators who passed the law, which Gov. Kim Reynolds signed in May, have said their aim is to protect children from inappropriate content and pornographic material in schools.

More: Annie's Foundation founder Sara Hayden Parris goes 'above and beyond' to counter book bans

Melissa Sly

Melissa Sly's love of the Camelot Theater is evident, where she is the third generation to connect with Nevada's historic landmark. Now as president of the Camelot Theater Foundation, She is heading a $2.5 million project to renovate the 95-year-old theater. The update will add a bistro, a rooftop bar and flexible seating to accommodate a variety of uses, including plays, live music and corporate events.

More: Childhood memories of Nevada theater inspire a third-generation fan to lead its renovation

Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith, the founder of and lead trainer and mentor at Innovative Athletic Sports Performance (IAP), shuffles between stations, offering tweaks and tips as his athletes rotate through drills. He’s pulled in several directions: working on a football player’s footwork, correcting a track athlete’s sprinting technique, or instructing a volleyball player to get more air. Even outside of the facility, that’s how Smith lives his life, dropping everything and giving everything for his athletes. That's why he is one of the Des Moines Register's People to Watch in 2024.

More: Ryan Smith drops everything to train, mentor some of Des Moines metro's top young athletes

Sam Summers

While he was still in college at Iowa State, Sam Summers founded First Fleet Concerts, a promotion and booking company that’s responsible for shows across the middle of the country. He co-owns the 683-capacity live entertainment venue Wooly’s in the East Village; started Hinterland Music Festival, which brought musicians Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan to Iowa last summer; and partnered with Live Nation to book the new Waukee venue Vibrant Music Hall. And he bought the Val Air Ballroom for $1.9 million, shutting it down in December 2022 to renovate it back to its 1950s heyday. His long investment in developing Des Moines’ music scene and his upcoming opening of the historic Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines in February make Summers one of the Des Moines Register's People to Watch in 2024.

More: With Val Air reopening, Sam Summers expands the breadth of musical acts visiting Des Moines

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Get to know the Des Moines Register's 2024 People to Watch