Building For Tomorrow - Stone Soup 2026 Keynote

At the heart of this year’s Stone Soup was a message of building for tomorrow. Specifically, new collaborative efforts between Housing Hope and the Edmonds School District to bring to life a new model for affordable housing that is designed to support McKinney-Vento families and children experiencing homelessness.

Scriber Place will be the first housing community to adopt such a model in all of Washington. By working closely with school districts to develop surplus school land into thriving affordable housing communities, we will be able to make a direct impact on an under-supported demographic. In the Edmonds School District alone, over 800 children are either homeless or lack consistent housing. Scriber Place helps address this, and will be the first step on a larger journey toward our future.

During Stone Soup, Francisco Gonzales Robles, Latisha Williams, Aidan FitzGerald, Elijah Bergman, Madalyn Bryant, Meadow Wasserman, and Roan Clarke brought to life the lived experiences from actual families and students in the Edmonds School District in a powerful keynote address. Studies conclusively show that the effects of homelessness directly impact a blossoming student’s ability to focus on their education, negatively impacts relationship building, and quickly adds additional mountains that students must climb to stay on pace with students not facing daily uncertainties. Through combining a heartfelt performance with the emotional weight so many are facing daily, this year’s program really helped to highlight the importance and tangible impact that an affordable housing community like Scriber Place will have on an often times invisible homeless demographic.

We have heard from so many of our attendees how impactful the program was this year and all of us at Housing Hope are so unbelievably proud of the students and faculty that came together and spent countless hours working to ensure that the performance was grounded, representative of issues facing many, and one that emotionally resonated with the core mission we all hold near and dear to our hearts. If you’d like to experience the keynote program for yourself we are excited to share that a full recording is currently being edited and will be available for you to view and share with others very soon.

We hope that you will check out the performance when it is made available soon, and if you feel called to get involved and support Scriber Place and other projects like it, we encourage you to make a donation to Housing Hope today. Funds raised during Stone Soup go to directly supporting the our core mission, housing, job training programs, support services, and future development of housing communities such as Scriber Place. Support from people like you really does make a difference and ensures that we can continue to push the boundaries on who we can serve, and how we can do it.

Thank you for being a part of the solution, and helping keep hope alive for thousands across Snohomish County.