King County’s plan to fix homelessness was supposed to put power in the hands of those who’ve been homeless. Did it?
Kirk McClain, a member of the Lived Experience Coalition, speaks at a virtual session of the Regional Homeless Authority’s governance committee. Members of the coalition say that although the county included people on the committee who have... (KCRHA)
For the last 20 years in the Seattle-area fight against homelessness, efforts have been cyclical: Governments and providers say they’re going to solve the issue and seek input from experts and people who’ve actually been homeless, but then continue much the same way they have in the past. 2020 is supposed to be the year things change, with the creation of a Regional Homelessness Authority. A union of local governments with more representation and power than previously existed in one body, the authority would streamline, plan and make decisions about who receives all local government funding for homelessness. Beyond its power, one important new aspect of the authority is that it would give an unprecedented amount of say to the people it’s supposed to serve: people who’ve actually been homeless before.
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Three members of the governing committee — which has final say on all policy and hiring in the regional authority, and also has members from King County government, the City of Seattle, and an alliance of surrounding cities — are people who’ve experienced homelessness and also have experience in social services or advocacy. But those three — and the coalition of homeless and formerly homeless people they represent, called the Lived Experience Coalition — say they have been “railroaded” by the county and nonprofit leaders, said Sara Rankin, a co-founder of the Lived Experience Coalition and law professor at Seattle University.
“It’s a generous con,” Rankin said. “They may be invited to the table, but once that box is ticked off, they’re not given a genuine, meaningful position of authority. … It seems like the Lived Experience Coalition is being systematically stripped.” Who chooses the seats? In the original design of the authority, people with lived experience would be chosen by and answer to the Lived Experience Coalition, a democratic group of homeless and formerly homeless people.
The Lived Experience Coalition was created in 2018 by organizers who’ve been homeless or were homeless at the time — some public employees, some advocates, some people who had advised county policy in the past. It’s made up of 100 general membership seats who meet bimonthly and vote on who among them will fill 25 leadership seats. That would provide a body to hold these unelected positions accountable, according to Marc Dones, executive director of the National Innovation Service and one of the architects of the new system. It could make it less likely those positions are filled by people hand-picked by nonprofits, something the authority wants to avoid, since much of its work involves deciding what money goes to which strategy and which nonprofit. Many members of the coalition are not afraid to criticize the system and even the nonprofit service providers who prop it up; in interviews, members criticized some homeless service providers, and called them part of a “homeless industrial complex.”
“In the housing and homelessness sector, we absolutely have a very strong nonprofit industrial complex,” Dones said. “And how systems work is they create the messengers they need for their own perpetuation.”
Bringing the Lived Experience Coalition onto the governing board wasn’t an idea everyone involved with the creation of the authority agreed with Former Bellevue Mayor John Chelminiak, for instance, advocated last year that the entire governing committee be made up of elected officials.
The coalition is very diverse, and its largest demographics are Black and African American (35%) and Native American (25%), the two groups who become homeless at the highest rates in King County, despite the fact they comprise smaller rates of the housed population. The coalition started the year in a rocky spot: Members who come to meetings are supposed to be paid $20 a meeting from the county for their time, but in January all stipends went unpaid until roughly May, according to Juanita Spotted-Elk, a member of the coalition. Leo Flor, director of the county Department of Community and Human Services, whose office was in charge of providing stipends, said they were delayed because of a change in the county’s “internal process.”
But leading members of the coalition feel this is simply one instance in a pattern of sidelining people with lived experience, not only by county employees, but nonprofit leaders and elected officials closely involved in homelessness work. Coalition members would like to choose who sits in the seats reserved for people with lived experience on the governing committee. But the final version of the Inter-Local Agreement creating the committee and the authority gave that power instead to a board of mostly nonprofit leaders, called the Continuum of Care Board, who would consider, but not be bound by the coalition’s recommendations.
Of the three people the Lived Experience Coalition’s leadership team recommended for the governing seat positions, only one was eventually appointed by the Continuum of Care Board — and the two others nominated weren’t even members of the Coalition (although they have since joined). "At their whim, the (Continuum of Care) Advisory Board could remove the leaders with lived experience off of those seats, could determine how long the tenure is in those seats. And so they have a lot of power and control,” said Lamont Green, a co-founder and interim co-chair of the Lived Experience Coalition.
“We’re learning as we go along,” said Sara Levin, who sits on that advisory board and is vice president of United Way of King County. “It’s new muscles we’re stretching as we learn how to share power, and when authority is delegated and when it isn’t.”
The coalition members and other regional homeless authority members are currently writing the bylaws for the authority, where they hope their role can be further enshrined and they can be given more control over the seats. But since their appointments, governing board members with lived experience say they’ve been kept out of the loop, informed sometimes just an hour before about staffing meetings, and not provided meeting materials beforehand, several members said in a governing board meeting in June. Flor said his department, which is in charge of these meetings, was in transition and “working kinks out.”