Kat's Corner - May 2025

matthewjager4
1 day ago
3 min read

Happy May! Welcome to Kat's Corner.

As the new Interim CEO of Housing Hope, I’m excited to use this new avenue to communicate with you all the happenings of our organization and have you be in the know on new developments at the agency. I welcome questions and conversations from anything you read in our newsletter so always feel free to reach out to me. Here’s some of what's happening right now.

Housing Hope & HopeWorks Legal Merger

We have been preparing for some time now for the legal entity merger of Housing Hope & HopeWorks. While this may sound like a big deal, we are hoping that it’s not something you even notice. The two organizations have really operated together administratively for many years now, so it is our intention to reduce the administrative burdens of managing the two legal entities to merge into one. Which means we will be inviting all HopeWorks board members to join the Housing Hope board officially and have one board of directors to govern all activities of the agency. You won’t see a change in the way we do business, HopeWorks will remain in our marketing and in the name of the programs we operate i.e. HopeWorks Social Enterprises and HopeWorks Job Training Program. I hope you will join us at Kindred Kitchen on July 24th to celebrate the accomplishments of the HopeWorks Board over the past 14 years and to recognize the opening of the Gates Foundation Culinary Training Kitchen.

Stone Soup 2025

We had a wonderful show of support at Stone Soup 2025 with over 500 attendees and donations still rolling in at over $450,000. Our Resource Development, Marketing and Communications team presented a cohesive program featuring the theme of ‘Welcome to our Neighborhood’ based on Mr. Rogers. (Huge shout out to Joan Penney, Sr. Director, on her vision for this event!) We featured four awardees of our Volunteer of the Year, Employee of the Year, Edwin R. Petersen Pioneer Award and the Housing Hope Partner Award. We were also joined by our keynote speaker Michael Larson, who shared with us the importance of older adult affordable housing opportunities as the older adult population is the fastest growing demographic of homelessness in the United States. This is timely for us as an organization as we are in the predevelopment stages of our first ever older adult housing project here in the City of Everett. Michael shared a hopeful message on how all of us can be part of the solution to stopping homelessness when we work together. We’re grateful for his advocacy for this work and knowing that we don’t venture into these solutions alone. We will be sure to share updates about Stone Soup success via social media which will also have photos from the evening as well.

Stewardship Development – Scriber Place

A new partner we have chosen to develop Scriber Place with is Stewardship Development (https://stewardshipdevelopment.com/). Stewardship has been involved in Housing Development since 1989, operating mainly out of Eugene, Oregon. While they have newly ventured into affordable housing, they have begun partnering with non-profit organizations to build affordable housing and help build internal capacity for development. Scriber Place is in Lynnwood. This new living community is a collaboration with the Edmonds School District to provide housing for children and their families who are experiencing homelessness in the district. Housing Hope is leasing the land from the district and will build, manage and operate 52 units of housing focused on stabilizing families. Groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for September 2025, and we will be in contact with more information on how you can attend the event and help support Scriber families. To learn more about Scriber Place go to our website at www.housinghope.org/southcounty We are looking forward to building capacity and minimizing our development risks with Stewardship as we continue our mission in creating more affordable housing in Snohomish County.

Those are some of our big updates for the month of May. I look forward to sharing more updates monthly through Kat’s Korner. Thank you all for your support of Housing Hope and HopeWorks in our integral work in Snohomish County. We couldn’t do this without you!