At the end of a two-hour long meeting on July 18 where service providers representing more than 20 organizations described deep and far-ranging concerns with the proposed regional homelessness authority, Gavin Cooley, one of the architects of the plan, took the microphone.
Cooley has been volunteering for over a year on this effort and seemed a bit exhausted. He had been the target of much of the group’s ire over the course of the evening’s discussions. Shortly before he took the mic, several attendees shouted out “burn it down,” calling for the entire process to be jettisoned.
Cooley acknowledged the power the homeless service provider community holds: without their support, the regional collaborative is likely doomed to fail. But, he said, he hopes they chose to collaborate rather than blow the process up.
“This whole group [of service providers] can grab ahold of the process and say ‘we want it,’’’ Cooley said.
Service providers had organized the meeting in response to a draft regional homeless authority plan unveiled in late June by Spokane Unite. That group, led by Cooley and two other cabinet members whose collective experience spans several Spokane mayors (Theresa Sanders and Rick Romero) drafted the plan after months of behind-the-scenes legal wrangling and meetings with local governments and other stakeholders. But, in many cases, service providers felt unheard and even offended by the plan’s focus on incarceration and descriptions of unhoused people.
While the list of frustrations with the Spokane Unite plan and how it was drafted was long, several themes emerged from the two-hour long meeting. Service providers felt the plan:
- Didn’t do enough to value or represent people with lived experience of homelessness.
- Failed to consider the specific impact of homelessness and incarceration on BIPOC communities.
- Had an inappropriate reliance on detention and lacked data-driven and evidence-based solutions to homelessness, mental health and substance use disorders.
- Contained stigmatizing language that was harmful to affected communities.
Elevating lived experience
Ami Manning, who coordinates the Right of Way Initiative (the state-funded effort to move people from Camp Hope into housing options) for the Spokane Low-Income Housing Consortium (SLIHC), kicked off the meeting with a focus on the voices she felt were missing from the original homelessness authority plan. Voices like her own.
“I am a person with lived experience [of homelessness] and I believe deeply in housing justice, and that housing is fundamental to the health of people and by extension our community,” Manning said. “We invited you here tonight with little notice because we have deep, deep concerns about the recommendations put forward for the regional homeless housing, health and public safety authority.”
Unite Spokane’s proposal for the Regional Homelessness Authority put out by Unite Spokane only included one position for a person with lived experience of homelessness on the 13-person governing board. This left many providers who see lived experience as a core value of responsive care — many of whom have been unhoused themselves — feeling unheard and underrepresented.
“We were kind of approached about this like this was going to be a community-centered, provider-centered, [with] lived-experience experts being able to be in the room with politics being taken out of it,” said Layne Pavey, the clinical director and founder of Revive Counseling Spokane. “What we got was — maybe the politicians jumped in later — but it is just reliving the experience that I’ve had in the no new jail campaign that we’ve been fighting since 2008 in this town. As a formerly incarcerated person, it never feels like we’re a part of this system that we’re calling the housing system in Spokane.”
Maurice Smith, who worked as a camp manager for Jewels Helping Hands at Camp Hope, said that, without a drastic reimagining of the board make-up, it might not be worth providers engaging. “If we were starting something from scratch and didn’t have anyone telling us how to do it, what would we do?” Smith asked a workgroup considering recommendations about what the organization’s structure could look like.
“Let’s figure out what a board would look like if we were creating it ourselves and do that,” Smith said. “If the new organization is not willing to do that, then it’s the wrong organization and we need to move on.”
While there was a focus on increasing voices with lived experience, some also added that it needed to be people who were in a good place to share their experience and that people who fit in other positions on the board — like those reserved for politicians, business people and housing specialists — could be people with lived experience.
“I guarantee you somewhere in the community we can find one of these people that has lived experience,” said Breia Gorder, who has worked for several local service providers and is formerly homeless. “I think we’re underselling individuals with lived experience: We’re business owners, we work at the city level, there are people that are politicians with lived experience.”
The overall message was that elevating the voice of people with lived experience and those working directly with people experiencing homelessness was critical to the success of the regional collaborative. “We really started out with talking about service providers having a voice in decision-making,” said Angel Tomeo, the co-founder of Yoyot Spq’n’i and an advocate for incarcerated people with the Bail Project. “We’re the ones who can really recognize most the missing pieces, the solutions gap, the things that we need.”
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BIPOC communities
Tomeo was among many who expressed frustration with both the lack of acknowledgement of BIPOC communities in the homelessness plan and the value of culturally relevant services. Tomeo said that she thought the most important topic her workgroup covered was the need to recognize the impacts of homelessness on BIPOC communities and what those communities can offer to the unhoused community. The organization should be “really getting into and sharing what [BIPOC communities] do, what their strategies culturally, traditionally are — what folks are doing about homelessness,” said Tomeo.
Pavey said this lack of acknowledgment of BIPOC communities didn’t reflect the years of ongoing work to stop perpetuating racial disparities in the Spokane justice system. National organizations like the Vera Institute and MacArthur Foundation have focused efforts in Spokane to undo racial biases in the criminal legal system.
“We had experts come in from all over the country and say even one day in jail creates huge problems for people, especially when they have co-occurring disorders, especially when you’re not paying attention to racial disparities,” Pavey said. “There was nothing addressing racial disparities.”
In order to address the legacy of racial injustice, Jonathan Teeters, the policy director for Empire Health Foundation, said the regional homelessness collaborative needed to go beyond equal representation in its board make-up. “Whatever we end up pushing forward, we actually have to over-represent certain groups and individuals to reach something that is equitable,” Teeters said.
Part of achieving that equity is involving a group that is conspicuously absent from the current proposal: local tribes. “Tribes are glaringly missing,” Teeters said. “We’re talking about having government entities here. There is an innate government-to-government role [for local tribes].”
Evidence-based alternatives to detention
One of the guiding principles included in the Spokane Unite pitch for the homelessness authority was that “detention remains a necessary accountability tool.” That principle, and connections that have been made by RHA organizers between funding the homelessness authority and the passage of a public safety levy centered around increased jail capacity, have been a serious concern for service providers.
“When you criminalize homelessness and addiction and [there is a] lack of permanent supportive housing and a lack of treatment options, you just put people who are already traumatized into an even more traumatizing situation,” said Revive’s Pavey. “Then, you kick them out with a new criminal history that creates further barriers to housing.”
Criminalizing homelessness has also been ruled unconstitutional by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers most of the Western United States. The court ruled that incarcerating people for resting or camping on public property when no shelter beds are available amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Michelle Pappas, the Spokane Program Manager and Racial Equity Staff Liaison with Futurewise Washington, argued that the plan’s inclusion of incarceration was counterproductive. “Detention is not based on sound and current data,” Pappas said. “Detention furthers trauma and does not allow an environment for people to heal.”
While the mic was being passed around in the meeting, a service provider reiterated, “Jail cannot be our housing plan.”
A recent meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Prisoner Health found that people who are imprisoned “are over twenty times more likely to be homeless than those in the general population.” Locally, point-in-time counts have shown that the number one cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing, not mental illness or substance abuse, which are often cited as reasons for people to be funneled into the criminal legal system.
In order to disrupt the prison-to-homeless-pipeline, Hallie Burchinal of Compassionate Addiction Treatment argued for more culturally relevant and individualized interventions. “Our model is about meeting our people, the people that we serve, the people that we truly care about and love, exactly where they’re at,” Burchinal said. “It’s recognizing that every single person we meet has a story of trauma, and that if we don’t settle into that and hold that safe space, then we’re only causing harm. This model [proposed by the RHA] does not address that we’re working with people with significant trauma.”
Pavey said that moving forward with a plan that leans on detention would repeat the mistakes that have made Spokane’s homelessness crisis so desperate. “If we go forward with this plan, we are going to see the same thing that Spokane has been doing for years, which is just try to hit the nail with the only hammer they have, which is law enforcement,” Pavey said.
“There’s a fentanyl opioid crisis right now with a ton of funding coming in state and federally,” Pavey said. “Why aren’t we focusing on the treatment centers? Why are we listening to the politicians about building a new detention center when we haven’t even opened a detox or an inpatient treatment center? Why are we even listening to the detention center option when we haven’t invested in permanent supportive housing or housing development?”
Pappas asked for a complete removal of detention-centered language from the document, and especially the idea that involuntary detention for people with mental illness could be part of the region’s homeless response. “This pushes a fundamental misunderstanding of what these diagnoses mean to people who live with them,” said Pappas, who identified herself as someone who experiences mental illness. “It shows a clear lack of interaction with this group and the disability community. I recommend that we remove all language regarding detention from this plan.”
Destigmatizing language
Service providers called for an apology for the language used in the document and criticized the way the document refers to homeless people and people experiencing substance use and mental health disorders.
“There was really stigmatized language throughout this document,” Burchinal said. “I feel like in order to move forward, language matters. We have to pay very close attention to language and what it means to people experiencing homelessness.”
“I meet people out in the streets all the time with stories that are relatable to me on a personal level. We’re all people, we’re all human and this document does not embrace that fact,” Burchinal said. “It talks about citizens and visitors feeling safe and secure. When I was homeless, I was a citizen. I’ve always been a citizen. I think we need to really dive into language and building out something that’s applicable to embracing all of our humanity.”
Pappas also called out the language in the documents for the proposed homelessness authority. “This [plan] has deeply rooted negative stereotypes for people with mental illness — that they are necessarily incompetent of making sound judgments and that they are intrinsically dangerous — neither of which has any evidence to support.”
“We are referred to in this document as blight,” Pappas said. “The definition of blight is a thing that spoils or damages. What I would like from this is a formal apology for the language used against the disability community — naming and further oppressing those with the diagnosis of bipolar, schizophrenic and others.”
Next steps
The former city department leaders are hoping the cities of Spokane and Spokane Valley , and the Spokane County Board of Commissioners will pass resolutions in early -August allowing Spokane Unite to keep fleshing out the proposal, but give themwith greater access to city and county staff, data and contract information.
Then, they will continue building support — and designing the plan — for potentially an even trickier negotiation in mid-October: votes by Spokane City Council, Spokane Valley City Council and the Spokane County Board of Commissioners on whether or not those municipalities are ready to move forward with the regional homelessness authority. Without at least the county and city of Spokane’s approval, the idea would be on life support. But each municipality has their own opinions about where responsibility for the crisis lies, where the funding should come from, and even what solutions to employ.
As tough as the criticisms Cooley and his partners faced on July 18, this meeting was the beginning of a gantlet, not the end.
Rather than trying to rebut criticisms or negotiate specifics, Cooley asked the people in the room to consider the alternative. “We don’t want to see another year — the points about the current administration [handling of homelessness issues], the current way we approach homelessness — why would we want to do that for another year?” Cooley said, before handing over the microphone to Julie Garcia, the founder of Jewels Helping Hands.
Cooley said that he doesn’t like being the target of people’s frustrations, but that he understands that it’s part of his role and he will continue to show up and listen. “Keep us accountable, we need that,” Cooley said in an interview a few days after the meeting.
He also praised the service providers and said one of his goals is to earn their trust and elevate their voices moving forward. “These people are doing incredible work,” Cooley said. “We need to tell those stories.”
Garcia concluded the meeting by thanking everyone for coming and asking the gathered service providers to keep communication open. “We’re going to continue this conversation and continue this solution building and collaboration between providers,” Garcia said.
“If we can continue to keep doing this and collaborating, perhaps we could come up with some common ground,” Garcia said. “And, perhaps, help this initiative move forward in one way or another.”
