Regina Thompson moved easily through the basement of the Morning Star Baptist Church last week, a space accustomed to informal gatherings for the congregation that has been converted into 24-hour shelter space for up to 30 people at a time. She stopped to chat with two of the current residents, asking them about their day, before popping her head into the kitchen to check on how dinner was coming. Thompson was hoping to bake the residents some of her beloved banana bread before she was off for the day. For Thompson, the daytime shelter and outreach supervisor for Jewels Helping Hands (JHH), it was a work day like any other.
After dinner was served and her shift was over, though, she drove home, loaded the remainder of her belongings into the truck she borrowed from JHH Executive Director Julie Garcia, and moved them into a storage unit before heading back to Garcia’s place, where she planned to crash for the next couple of weeks. One of the people charged with helping unhoused people find housing was now homeless herself.
Thompson had done everything right. She had a full-time job and, until recently, a couple grand in her bank account for emergencies. She’d been saving up for a car.
In January, when the new mayor and council praised this new scatter-site model, and began talking about extending the contract with JHH to continue partnering with churches across the city, it sounded like job security. But as Thompson worked through the first months of the year, providing services at those church shelters and connecting folks still on the streets with resources, she found herself increasingly worried about her own housing.
Because of a series of complications with JHH’s contracts with the city of Spokane — including city staff sending the wrong billing form and a bizarre IT snafu that led to the city blocking all emails from JHH — the organization had not been reimbursed for contracts it was already owed. It is harder for smaller organizations to weather reimbursement schedules than larger organizations. Compared to other non-profits providing services to the unhoused like the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities of Spokane (CCS) and Volunteers of America, Jewels Helping Hands is tiny.
In 2022, the most recent year we have tax filings, CCS reported $26.5 million of revenue — Jewels Helping Hands reported about $717,000. (Because Salvation Army and Volunteers of America are national organizations that funnel money through a parent organization, it’s hard to know how much is spent locally.)
JHH says they just didn’t have enough cash in the bank to float the organization while it waited for payment, so Garcia, Thompson and other members of leadership had personally decided not to cash their paychecks to ensure the organization could continue its work.
Thompson and Garcia both told RANGE it was more important to pay front-line workers to continue their street outreach efforts and non-management staff like Char (who asked to be referred to by her first name only), who lives and works at Morning Star while simultaneously battling cancer.
As days went by and checks remained uncashed, Thompson says she began to see more and more of her own situation in the faces of the people she was serving. Still, she tried to stay hopeful.
“I know I’m helping them by being here. They’re helping me by being here because I get to see the growth in them. And if they can see me pull out of it, they’re going to try, too,” Thompson told RANGE in an interview last Tuesday, just hours before she had to be out of her home. “I didn’t want to come [to work] today, but I’m here — and I’m glad I’m here.”
The organization’s last contract expired in the first week of March. To prevent losing the bed capacity created by the scatter sites, JHH continued to operate the church shelters through March without any contract from the city. According to Garcia and JHH Treasurer Jason Green, there had been verbal and written promises from the city that a contract was coming, and JHH didn’t want to shut everything down and put people back on the streets if the city was going to turn around and give them a contract. City spokesperson Erin Hut told RANGE in a text that the city is within their contractual timeline on all payments. Neither Garcia nor Green dispute that, but because of how much smaller JHH is than others, and how much less cash they have on hand at any given time, the lag caused by the email mixup and the city’s normal reimbursement schedule forced some tough decisions.
Thompson says she kept working without a paycheck because she believes in the work they are doing (she was the last employee to leave Camp Hope when it closed), but the more Thompson had to dip into her dwindling savings to pay for things like rent, the more stressed she became. Eventually, with little savings left, Thompson had to pack up her things and couch surf until the contract issues were resolved.
On the day she moved out of her home, Thompson had nearly $7,000 worth of undeposited paychecks.
Contractual compliance
The idea for the scatter-site shelters came from Jewels Helping Hands, and the organization had been laying the groundwork to get them launched for over a year. They’d announced their intent to open self-funded scatter-site shelters at the beginning of 2024, and the city reached out to contract with them during the state of emergency Mayor Lisa Brown declared on January 11. JHH has been contracting with the city since then.
The city had budgeted $34,374 for the first 10 days of service, and an additional $116,688 to guarantee services from the end of January to the beginning of March. According to Hut, “We are not delayed on paying Jewels, we are within our contractual timeline on payments.”
Hut said once the city receives an invoice for services rendered, they have 30 days to send payment.
But because the city operates its homelessness services contracts on a reimbursement model, it needed invoices from JHH before it would pay. But those invoices from January 11 to January 21 didn’t show up in the city’s inbox because the organization’s emails were getting blocked, which prevented JHH from getting the correct billing paperwork from the city or sending in an invoice.
According to reporting from The Inlander, Garcia had emailed Brown’s office on February 6, stating that JHH couldn’t bill against its completed contract “because we can not get anyone to send us a billing form.”
By the time the email situation finally got sorted out and Garcia was able to complete the billing form and send an invoice, it was already February 13 — more than a month after JHH had started providing services. The city cuts checks to contractors on a relatively standard 30-day timeline, but the countdown doesn’t start when the contractor begins trying to send invoices, it starts once the invoice reaches the city.
Ultimately, the city paid JHH for the $34,374 contract on March 7 — three weeks after finally receiving the invoice but over a month after JHH started trying to send them.
While the first contract was getting sorted, the city approved a second $116,688 contract with JHH to extend services after the state of emergency ended through the first week of March. Hut said the city received an invoice for that contract on March 8.
As of Monday, March 18, JHH had been providing shelter services since January 11 but had only been paid $34,374 by the city. Additionally, because the second contract ended 10 days earlier, JHH had been working without a contract to bill against entirely. It’s a risky thing for an organization to do, but this is not the first time a Spokane organization supporting the unhoused has chosen to do so. In October 2022, Mike Shaw, CEO of the now-defunct Guardians, which operated the Trent shelter, told RANGE “I have no idea when I’m gonna get a contract back to sign … In the past I’ve operated like three months as the operator without a contract signed.”
City council was set to consider a third contract with JHH the evening of March 18 that would guarantee funding for the scatter sites until August.
With the alternative being to close the scatter sites and turn 60 unhoused people back on the streets while they awaited payment for the second contract and ratification of the third, Garcia, Thompson and their team made the decision to stay open.
Sharing the risks to share the rewards
Garcia and Green, the treasurer of JHH, both believe the scatter site model could be the future of Spokane sheltering. Council President Betsy Wilkerson shares that hope. “I have been a fan of the scattered site model since day one,” Wilkerson said at a special meeting last Thursday. “A neighborhood can absorb 20, 30, maybe 40 people. But a neighborhood cannot absorb 300 people at one time.” Conservative Council Member Jonathan Bingle shares that optimism.
“When we put too many people in one particular neighborhood, we see what happens. We saw that with Camp Hope. We see it with TRAC. We see it even with Cannon and some of the others,” Bingle said. “And so the scatter site where it’s 15 to 20 in a bunch of different neighborhoods is the future. It’s far cheaper. It’s far more effective.”
In addition to spreading out the impacts of sheltering Spokane’s unhoused, Green sees what JHH is doing as a much more cost-effective alternative — the proposed contract extension through August would pay JHH $342,000 to provide 60 beds for six months — about $950 per bed per month. The Salvation Army, by contrast, is paid $750,000 per month of operations at the 250-bed Trent Shelter, a cost of $3,000 per bed per month. Breaking down the scatter-shelter budget to a per bed rate is the easiest way to compare costs, but the majority of the $342,000 in the JHH contract will pay for full time staff at the churches.
With the city projecting a $50 million budget deficit, those cost savings may be necessary to continue providing anywhere near the number of shelter beds that have been necessary for the last several years. In January, the Cannon shelter near Browne’s Addition was reopened by the Brown administration to create additional beds during the cold winter months, but has already closed down again. RANGE previously reported that the city violated its own laws by not opening up emergency warming space during the cold snap in early March — a failure Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services Director Dawn Kinder said came down to the city running out of money in its emergency shelter budget just two months into the year.
“I think the answer for the city to be fiscally responsible is to start working with some smaller nonprofits because they are more nimble and they will do the work for a lot less money. They have a lot less overhead,” Green said. “We don’t charge 25% for indirect [like administrative and service costs], like the Salvation Army does.”
According to Garcia, that savings doesn’t mean a drop in service. “We have housed into better situations 22 people experiencing homelessness,” Garcia said. “We have people with jobs. We’re starting a work program.”
She also said that 15 residents are currently in addiction treatment. “It’s hard work. In the middle of this, we’re in a fentanyl crisis and people are dying on us left and right, but we’ve had no overdoses at our centers.”
They’ve also had a lot of engagement and support from the community. Part of the reason they’re able to keep their costs so low, Garcia said, is because they aren’t having to charge the city for food — almost all of the food for shelter residents is donated by local businesses and community volunteers. And the shelter residents give back, doing regular neighborhood clean-ups and becoming part of the communities they’re living in. This is a marked contrast from how neighbors have complained about large congregate shelters like House of Charity downtown and the Trent Shelter, both of which sit in Council District 1.
This community integration and flexibility is part of what’s drawn so much support from the council.
“Neighborhoods begin to adopt certain sites and it brings a lot of care and love into that space,” said Bingle, who toured some of JHH’s shelters. “I hope we do a lot more of that.”
“There’s a lot of advantages to scatter site sheltering,” said Council Member Kitty Klitze, who represents District 3, where Morningstar Baptist is located. “Not every person facing homelessness has the same needs and having options for people with different needs would be a great option and a benefit of the scatter site model.”
Green thinks that even more small nonprofits could be running nimble, innovative, programs that provide the city with sheltering services while being cost-effective for the community. But to do that, he thinks the city will have to take a few more risks — namely, moving away from the reimbursable billing system which required JHH to front more than $80,000 in cash and instead start giving advances on contracts.
“It’s the whole reason why small nonprofits really could never do business with the city of Spokane. If you’re going to get a contract, regardless of the value of that contract, you have to have at least two months worth of cash on hand to be able to survive the payment process through the government,” Green said. “There’s a lot of benefit for the city to be able to start working with nonprofits that are small like us, and there are others out there that are willing to do the work. They just don’t have the capital to do that work with the city.”
Outside of reconsidering the reimbursement system, Garcia wants to see the city rebuild some of the trust that previous administrations lost among service providers by getting out of the way of the people doing the work — if they’re not going to help, Garcia said, “at least stop hindering us.”
“The last administration spent four years just making it harder for no reason just because they personally didn’t like what we do,” Garcia said. “We’re okay with jumping through the hoops that are unfortunately our shitty system, but don’t make new ones.”
‘It’s exhausting to keep doing this.’
With JHH’s cash reserves nearly spent and at least one staff member unhoused, the March 18 city council meeting was supposed to set the ship straight until the end of summer. The $342,000 contract would be backdated to the first week of March to ensure back pay and extend to the end of August, ensuring paychecks going forward for the entire JHH staff paychecks for six months.
Everything had gone smoothly at the briefing session prior to the March 18 ouncil meeting — where councilmembers typically discuss any concerns or questions with consent agenda items prior to their evening legislative session — so Garcia expected their budget to pass easily that evening.
But what was supposed to be a routine vote was derailed during public testimony on the consent agenda, when a few men spoke against the contract with JHH, saying they didn’t want the city to give money to people who committed fraud (Green pled guilty to fraud over ten years ago in a case that was not associated with JHH.)
Katherine Corrick then stood up to speak in support of the contract and in defense of JHH. She said that, though she was an employee of JHH, she was speaking only as a private citizen, and wanted the council to know how effective the JHH scatter site shelters had been. During her testimony, she mentioned offhand a problem with the plumbing at Knox Presbyterian, one of the churches hosting 20 beds, that led to the church shutting down. This led to several council members expressing confusion about the total number of beds being offered by JHH, and whether or not a potential decrease in beds at Knox due to plumbing issues was reflected by the contract on which the council was about to vote.
The council then took the somewhat rare step of trying to answer these questions during the meeting, calling Nicolette Ocheltree, the council’s homelessness and housing initiatives manager, and Dawn Kinder, head of NHHS, on speaker phone.
Ocheltree picked up immediately and said she hadn’t heard of any decreases in beds, but said Kinder supervised the contract and would be the final authority on any changes that could have occurred. Kinder didn’t answer on the first call, and so the council moved to defer the contract until they could get confirmation JHH was still providing the 60 beds they had promised.
Kinder eventually called back and said JHH was still providing 60 beds, but couldn’t give the council a satisfactory answer about which churches were housing exactly how many beds, so the council stuck with the deferral, asking Kinder to present clear data to them by Thursday, March 21, when they committed to holding a special legislative session — in place of their usual weekly study session — to vote on the contract.
While all this was happening, Thompson had settled down for a spaghetti dinner with Garcia and her granddaughter, anticipating that the contract would pass easily. The relief they felt evaporated when a friend who had been watching the meeting remotely told them that the contract was being pulled out of the consent agenda and deferred.
The meeting was still in session, so Garcia and Thompson loaded up Garcia’s granddaughter and the three of them raced to the meeting, hoping to answer the council’s questions and get the contract approved that night so they could finally submit an invoice to get everyone paid for the past few weeks of work. They got there in the last few moments of the meeting, but Wilkerson was in the process of adjourning it by the time any of the council members noticed Garcia in the audience.
Garcia, nearly in tears and with Thompson in tow, confronted a handful of council members who stayed to listen to her, citing the confusion of the evening as another slight in a long line of issues with the city, including the fact that JHH had been chosen to take over the TRAC shelter from Salvation army in July 2023, only to see that process derailed by an appeal and eventually canceled.
They were still providing the same number of beds they’d been contracted for, Garcia told Council Members Paul Dillon, Jonathan Bingle, Lili Navarrete and Kitty Klitzke. The two other churches they worked with — Morning Star Baptist and New Apostolic — had added an extra 10 beds to accommodate the 20 displaced by Knox Presbyterian’s plumbing issue. This put the two shelters at 30 beds each, under the 40-bed capacity approved by fire marshals under a plan that Garcia said had been approved by Kinder.
“Because a lady doesn’t know what she’s talking about, this gets deferred and my staff doesn’t get paid,” Garcia told council members. “Every time this happens it makes it harder and harder for us to provide service. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to keep doing this.”
Council members were apologetic for the chaos of the meeting and the deferral of the contract, especially Dillon and Bingle — who Garcia said had been champions of the project. They reassured Garcia the vote would happen later that week, at the special legislative session, but the delay and questions swirling around the meeting still left Garcia frustrated and feeling hopeless.
“From one day to the next, our employees don’t know, ‘Are we working? Are we not? Can we pay our rent? Can we not?’” Garcia told RANGE.
She also worried about the effects the uncertainty had on the people using JHH’s services, who may not be sure if the shelters they are staying in would remain open.
Last week, Garcia told RANGE she couldn’t sleep Monday night after the meeting, and spent all of the following Tuesday morning calling city leadership, trying to figure out where exactly the confusion had come from and what questions she needed to answer in order to ensure the contract passed on Thursday, March 21.
“Not one person so far that I’ve spoken with today from council to leadership, to administration, none of them have an answer as to what happened last night,” Garcia told RANGE that day. “They’re the folks making it hard at this point. When we got new leadership, I was so unbelievably hopeful for change … and at this point, I don’t see a difference.”
The contract ultimately passed unanimously on Thursday, with many of the council members speaking in support. Later that day, Garcia found out they would be getting paid the $116,688 for their second completed contract by the end of the week.
On Friday, March 22, Green told RANGE that Thompson got her checks Thursday night — too late for her to keep the housing she had already lost, but allowing her to start looking for a new place to live.
“She’s a happy lady,” Green said.
An additional sentence to clarify how JHH will use funds from the most recent contract was added after publication.
