Follow up story to Sweeping the Wind, also by Your friendly neighborhood homeless industrial complex worker
Photos by Sierra Hartman
Part I
On the first day of August in downtown Tacoma, I saw a young woman smoking fentanyl in a crowded church parking lot a few feet away from a narcotics anonymous meeting. She was wearing stained clothes that hung off her thin, brown body. Her eyes looked empty, missing something, devoid of hope. Yet, as she sucked that white smoke into a glass pipe, there was hope all around her. An open church, a roomful of recovering addicts who’d found another day of wellness, a homeless outreach worker offering her a cold water. She was in the right place and had the right problem, seemingly surrounded by possible solutions, a single glass door away from support. But that door only opens one way.
This young woman wasn’t a stranger. I’d known her as a young teen, back when I worked at an inpatient psychiatric facility for kids. A decade ago, she’d been full of life and light and laughed often and fully but also screamed in her sleep and when she woke up for a while thereafter. She’d come from trauma, into state care, into a higher level of state care, and eventually was spit out onto the street. She’d never had a chance.
A few years back, I’d seen her crouched between two houses, drinking from a water spigot, and recognized her from those inpatient psyche days. It had made me feel so hopeless I wrote a poem about it. And on this first day of August 2025, I thought about that poem as I offered her a cold water behind a church, next to an NA meeting. She was sitting in the hot sun, dripping beads of sweat onto freshly burnt and still smoking foil. She looked right through me. The man who pimps her out eventually accepted the water, thanked me and told her to drink it. Which she did, not knowing who I was or why.
The next day I drove to my cousin’s farm up in Whatcom County early enough in the morning to think clearly. I considered our local failures in policy and execution as regards the ever-growing population of homeless humans living in and around Tacoma. Our diminishing number of shelter beds, the sweeping the wind futility of our city-funded interventions, the usage of tiny homes as position holders in real estate deals, the upper management of local homeless service providers who train their teams to do less, to feel less, to be content with less. The lies that get passed around like truth in the name of self-care; the “some of them want to be homeless,” and “they have to be housing ready,” and “you should never be working harder than the client.” We fucking call them “clients.” Capitalism’s got us by the balls.
There’s a mayor’s race and none of the candidates have a full solution. There’s city council seats up for election waiting to be filled by the next whack-a-mole believer. And some of these believers are of us and from us, but what’s actually left to believe in? The money it takes to matter politically, the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on getting elected locally and millions, sometimes billions of dollars spent on getting elected nationally, is all wasted. It buys literally nothing. There is no product or good or service purchased with a campaign donation. It just collects and piles and is spent, almost exclusively on self-promotion. The logic of wasting huge sums of money on messaging to the voting public, each politician’s promised plans regarding how they will spend and/or save public money responsibly and for the good of all the voting public while spending none of the election cycle money on the voting public’s actual tangible real-life needs, goes largely unchallenged. It’s reckoned the cost of playing the game. This, while our shelters are shut down and our neighbors live in the dirt. This while our children’s schools balance giant deficits by firing their lowest-paid staff members. This while unaffordable apartments sit empty, and promised affordable developments remain unbuilt all over the city. All that political money every election cycle buying nothing but ego, vanity, recognition and maybe, maybe a seat at the table. A seat purchased on the backs of the poor.
These are the things I thought about as I drove toward my cousin’s farm to do farm work with my cousin. While we worked, my wife provided care and love to all the kids, ours and theirs, while my cousin’s wife was sitting with her mom, who was dying. There’s always a lot of while. The reason I came was love. I love my wife and my kids, my cousin, his wife, their kids. By extension, his wife’s mom. We are all connected. And it is that connection that moves us to sustainability.
I am connected to my work as a homeless outreacher because the people I reach out to are my people. I know what it is to feel invisible, lost and empty, alone even while surrounded by so many others. I know every breath I breathe is but for the grace of god. And then there’s another. And another. Each breath keeps coming and connects my past with gratitude to an ever-unfolding future. So I keep moving to the next camp and the next car and the next park and the one after that and after that with water and food and hope.
It all comes down to connection and sustainability. I overexplained this way forward to my cousin while stomping free seeds with my feet. Everything’s a metaphor. I told him about how our homeless sector interventions only work to solve homelessness when we prioritize community connection and intentionally affordable space that allows for individual and neighborhood investment in that space, which makes it sustainable. Sustainability and connection. I talked his ear off and in circles while being marginally useful. He heard my exhaustion, my at wits’ end, and suggested I eat a few mushrooms, rewire my internal connections a bit. Instead, I drove back home late at night because the next day, a Sunday, a dozen different homeless households were coming to meet me at my desk so I could guide them towards housing. Or shelter. Or a tent and a tip on a good place to hide. Telling a socially invisible population, people we try not to see, where to hide. I was speeding home to meet strangers already lining up in my subconscious. I was barely awake and eating miles on cruise control, barreling towards the parade of desperation that awaited. I was using a GPS to drive straight south on I-5. Everything’s a metaphor.
I know how lucky I am, and how fragile. I know that without my children and wife holding me up, loving me whole, tethering me to their belief in us, I’d be gone again. Some days I feel me slipping. I am connected to my father and my son, my mother and my daughter, all the parents and children, elders and babies, before me and those still to come. The midpoint of seven generations. Connected through our blood, thick with alcoholism and fearlessness, poverty and violence, justice, addiction, and a generational refusal to bow. I see my people outside, surviving, sometimes dying, but refusing to bow. I see my fellow outreachers, my family, fellow organizers, my cousin and his wife, fellow storytellers, working class solidarity, boots on the ground, and planted firmly, refusing to bow.
The morning after my cousin’s farm, I woke from a deep sleep to my son calling me through my dream. I had become stuck there. In my dream, it was night, and someone was breaking into my house and was coming up the stairs towards my family. But I heard them coming and in enough time to meet them at the stairs, to put myself between the threat and my family. To do whatever needs doing. I’ve always been good at doing whatever needs doing. It’s my comfort zone. I could feel my body coiling, my senses heightening, the courage rising into action in my dream world. Except, also in the dream, I was wrapped up in a blanket so tight I couldn’t move a muscle or even speak. And the threat that ran screaming up the stairs was a dirt-covered child from a homeless camp, a child I’d met in real, non-dream life months ago. He was screaming at the top of the stairs, and it was horrifying. I was trying to move, to say something, to fucking do anything, and my son was calling my name, and I was stuck exactly like that for a dream eternity. And then I woke up.
It is not sustainable for me to keep doing this work. My connection is such that I cannot leave it when I leave. It lives on in my head. I ran into a man at a shelter today and joyfully shook his hand because he remembered me from years ago and was happy to see me. But as I walked away wishing him well, all I could think about was the time that man had lost his whole-ass mind due to his friend hanging herself and alcohol and how he ended up out on 13th street, in the road, running uphill and screaming this raw, relatable, unresolvable rage at oncoming traffic as me and my giant friend Sam physically restrained him, at one point hugging him to the ground and holding him there, telling him it would be all right when we all three knew it sure as shit would not. I have flashes like that all the time, and they are as real when they occur as they were when they occurred. It feels unsustainable. Also, I do not know how I could not do this work and maintain my self-respect, my sobriety, my family. This is what connects me to my purpose. This is what I was made to do. Connection and sustainability.
My internal spiritual, emotional, mental, and existential struggle feels very on par with what’s happening on the streets right now, the chickens home to roost, piper being paid what’s owed reality of sweep after sweep after sweep, of humans herded in circles, of high stakes musical chairs where the losers lose literally everything. Right now, as shelter beds disappear and day centers close. As executive orders carve out new legal consequences, broader avenues of criminalization, more arguments to negate a person’s personhood. Right now.
I very much want to provide an answer, a light at the end of the tunnel, an alternative to sweeping the wind, a way forward. Hence, this essay. How do we build beloved community on shattered psyches, on broken stories, on other people’s trash? From dust we must rise, like we always do. Braiding it all back together into a thread worth following, connecting this crumbling capitalistic babel into something true, some bottom-up and sustainable reimagined one foot in front of the other, until there becomes a here. A way forward.
PART II
Let’s start with some foundational truths.
Homeless people are our people. Just like Live Action Role Playing people are, and the meatheads flexing in the mirror at the gym are and parents living vicariously through their children are, and those impeccably dressed at the club Saturday night and at church Sunday morning people are. These are our people. As Walt Whitman rightly wrote, we are many, we contain multitudes.
I know a man who earned a doctorate degree while homeless. I know a senior citizen who works more hours a week than I do and supports two households of grandkids while living in her car. I know a person who stays outside because their dog is their best friend, and no opportunity they’ve come across since losing their housing includes their big ass dog. I knew a gentle fella who refused the placement I found him at a behavioral health facility because he suffered night terrors and was afraid he would inadvertently harm innocent people while sleeping. Didn’t trust himself to sleep inside. I use past tense to tell his tale because he died outside during the coldest part of last winter, died alone while causing no harm. This harmless man, our people.
The fact that, as a city, as a country, as a society, we have trained ourselves to stop seeing homeless people, our people, should not surprise anyone. But know that reality does not exist separate from larger realities. Our local politics, values, ethics, they do not exist in a vacuum. We move globally, much like we move nationally, much like we move locally. We are connected. A decade or two, half a century from now, when we ask our offspring and the generations after that to believe we didn’t know civilians were buried under the rubble of Gaza, children starving to death in bombed out rock piles that used to be a civilization, that if only we had known the Palestinian people were being systematically and horrifically eradicated, we would have stopped it. When we make the case that though the genocide of a people happened on our watch, their blood is not on our hands; no matter how we write those history books, the truth will be self-evident. They will count our guilt in America’s alleyways and gutters. Because under the rubble, the streets don’t lie.
In the early 2000’s I spent a week demoing the inside of a house with the starting defensive tackle and center of a local college football team, both of whom had just completed their senior year season. We were poorly paid, but the benefits included all the alcohol we could drink and a place to crash for however long it took us to finish the job. The two freshly former football players were depressed as hell at not being football players anymore, and I was already a full-blown alcoholic and since demo work isn’t rocket science, we drank while working from whenever we woke up to sundown, ripping floors out and walls apart and generally fucking everything up. While intentionally destroying the inside of this house, anytime the center would knock over or spill his drink, he’d laugh and leave it saying, “It’ll soak up,” and go get a new one. After that job, I spent the rest of the summer with the defensive tackle, and “it’ll soak up” became our mantra. We used it to describe our accidents and mistakes, my alcoholism and his depression, all the shit beyond our control. “It’ll soak up,” we’d say, refusing to acknowledge our agency in the unraveling of our lives.
The streets don’t lie. When we train ourselves to stop seeing suffering, drive by suffering, step around suffering, that choice multiplies exponentially, universally, across our souls. It will not soak up. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Martin Luther King Jr wrote that. Those words convict me on the corners and parks in Hilltop, around Cheney Stadium and Highway 16 in central Tacoma, off the exit ramps and railroad tracks on the South side, around the casinos and up Portland Ave on the Eastside, under the 705 downtown, and everywhere Pacific Avenue goes. They should convict you, too. And if we don’t act on those convictions now, the consequences, the stakes, the future repercussions, are quite literally our humanity. There are people under the rubble. This will not soak up.
Nobody wants to be homeless. Shit happens to people, and they break and end up on the streets. Rents rise and jobs downsize, and everybody they know already has a full couch. There’s no room at the inn. There’s no fucking inn. Nobody wants to be homeless. Some people choose to be homeless, but it is always a choice made from an inability to make a better choice. People choose homelessness when the other choice is to stay with an abusive partner. People choose homelessness when the choice is to keep taking a medication that makes them numb, empty, and impotent. People choose homelessness when the other choice is to fail your loved ones, to fall constantly short of sobering up, to live as a consistent disappointment, an ever-present lesson of how not to be. Some people choose to take that shit to a tent.
When people choose homelessness, it is because there are no better choices and they haven’t the social capital to beg up a rescue. They become what we refuse to look at. They step away from our social contract, step outside, become less and less and less until we can hardly see them at all, until they are just hands holding a cardboard sign.
A letter from a local business community was passed on to me recently, and it was full of the real-life impacts homeless camps have on small businesses just trying to make it. The letter talked about open drug use and trash fires and non-discrete sex work, about blocked sidewalks and escalated mental health crises and shit in the street, and even about someone peeing on the business’s floor when they were refused use of the customers-only bathroom. I have no doubt these are real-life impacts, that they really happened/are happening, and it makes me sad. Also, there are real-life answers.
People don’t choose to shit in the street and piss on the floors of local businesses when they have available bathrooms. People don’t choose to burn trash and block sidewalks and use drugs outside when they have safe, heated places to be inside with access to regular trash removal services. People don’t choose to lose their god damned minds in public! They choose food over medication, a three-day meth bender over being assaulted while they sleep. And when they end up screaming at nothing on Tacoma Ave it’s because nothing is all they got and the chance to suffer that indignity quietly in private is just not an available option. Almost every choice unhoused people make that negatively impacts our local business community, our residential neighborhoods, comes down to a lack of better choices. Nobody wants to be homeless. Nobody wants this shit. Nobody.
Now, if we accept as truth that homeless people are our people, worthy of the same rights the rest of us are and we accept as truth that nobody wants to be homeless, we have a solid foundation from which to find a way forward. But in order to find the way to connection and sustainability, we must first admit the obvious truth that most of the ways we have fervently followed up until now are not working. The homeless industrial complex is a giant snake eating its tail and at the expense of both the unhoused humans it’s supposed to serve and all of us taxpayers who fund it. Perhaps an example is in order. Enter stage left, the “heal” team.
PART III
I am tired of writing about the City of Tacoma’s “heal” team. The idiocy of their continued existence is so in my face every day I almost can’t process it. They are expensive, publicly funded, and the epitome of a homeless service provider that doesn’t actually provide a service. They are window dressing. They are an excuse. They push people in circles around the city, spending tens of thousands of dollars per push, costing over a million dollars a year in staffing alone. And for what? The “heal” team acronym stands for Homeless Engagement Alternative Liaison, and they effectively do almost none of that. The “heal” team needs to be retired, posted notice on, and told to go all the way away, and immediately.
The “heal” team’s job is to show up in city vehicles and wearing bulletproof vests, to the places unhoused people have been reported having the nerve to exist at, sans housing, engage the homeless individuals and provide notification that they have to go away, and by what date, or be arrested. One would assume, based on their name, the “heal” team engages homeless households to offer an alternative to being homeless. If not period, at least they offer services as an alternative to the spot the homeless folks are no longer allowed to be homeless at. But this is not the case. The “heal” team rarely has services to offer, even less likely anything resembling an opportunity at housing. Sometimes they offer a shelter bed, but not usually; generally, those are full. And damn near every time I’ve personally encountered the “heal” team in the field, they don’t even have survival supplies, food/water, sleeping bag, tent or anything that would be useful to give to an individual, couple, or family forced to live outside. Suffice to say, they are not what their name claims. Their effective function is to gaslight and victim-blame the unhoused folks being cleared out of public spaces, to keep the burden of guilt on the marginalized people being removed from land, land this same city publicly acknowledges at every opportunity is not their own.
Every time I hear the rote, performative land acknowledgment that opens city business, I think of the “heal” team and throw up a little in my mouth. I think of the contradictory nature, the duplicitous blame-shifting functions both embody. How both perform completely for the benefit of the dominant culture. To show our commitment to indigenous liberation, the City of Tacoma will publicly acknowledge the people who used to exist here previous to our eradicating 98% of them. To show our commitment to our homeless neighbors, the City of Tacoma will hire a team with a nice-sounding name to stand by while police and wrecking crews clear unhoused humans like trash from land not their own. Their land acknowledgement is an admission of guilt with no plan to make it right. The “heal” team’s function is to exist in proximity to sweeps with no plan to make it right. They are both performative window dressing, virtue signaling the city can point at and say “we’re trying.” Well fuck that right in the ear. Try something else. Fire the “heal” team.
And to be perfectly clear, I’m not actually advocating for or against the practice of land acknowledgements. I’m pointing out the disingenuous nature of forcibly removing large swaths of disadvantaged populations from public land while cleaving to a performative recitation of facts regarding colonialism and the brutal genocide of the original American peoples. You can’t do both. Similarly, I’m not advocating for homeless camps in all public spaces. There are places homeless encampments cannot be. But in order to say “don’t be here,” we also have to say “you can be here,” or else we are just saying “don’t be.” Our responsibility as a city, state, country, as a society to the people who live outside, the unhoused, the homeless, is to provide better choices. Criminalizing a person’s existence, that which they have no way not to be, is an available societal choice. But it is neither a fiscally responsible nor a morally acceptable choice. There are people under the rubble. If the City of Tacoma truly believes a camping ban is necessary to protect our housed citizenry from the incursion of unflinching poverty, let us also offer a dignified neutral ground, a place to be.
There are empty spaces all over the city. City-owned former school spaces, what used to be driving range and power company spaces, down by the waterfront never-built-a-building spaces, end of the park never developed green spaces. All the dying white churches and sputtering liberal arts colleges with tiny congregations/students enrolled and unnecessarily giant campus spaces. There is no shortage of spaces. How hard would it be to set aside one sizable space per city council district and offer it as an exempt from the camping ban space, as an open to urban camping space, as a neutral space? Instead of just saying go away when homeless people camp on the sidewalk next to our children’s school, we could say go camp in one of the five available spaces specifically set aside for you to live in while re-finding the opportunity to regain housing. This is an ethical and responsible way forward, and it has the potential benefit of being both cost-effective and healing.
There is an entire block of barbed wire and fenced off emptiness on the north side of Tacoma between 19th and 21st, Adams and Washington. Or another empty and fenced-off city block between Dock Street and Thea Foss Esplanade, London’s Salon and Ethereal Tattoo downtown. Or that large chunk of land behind Homestead before it becomes Oak Tree Park. Pick whichever one you can most easily picture and picture three or four port-a-potties added and weekly garbage/recycling service provided, and the option for people who have no other options to put a tent or pallet shelter anywhere within those spaces. Build a small roofed and walled area with heat/cooling capabilities in each of those places, with tables and chairs for meals and meetings with case management and 12-step groups, and street medicine, and let the camps make their own shared agreements and self-govern as best they can. Use legitimate outreach teams (not “heal” who should be fired) to contact and invite the unhoused and unsheltered community into any of the five available spaces set aside, one per district. Have other homeless service providers bring services there, get folks into shelter and housing from there, into treatment and medical care from there, access to coordinated entry and employment from there. And watch the visible homeless wave finally begin to crest, to slowly recede. Watch this occur in step with the actual homeless crisis.
This is the way forward. We have to stop spending money on interventions that only feed themselves, that exist only to continue existing, and start investing that money again in directly serving the people. Fire the “heal” team. Open up unused space for people who need a space to be. Flood those spaces with resources, service providers, community care, with connection. Then watch our work become sustaining.
I know a 20-year-old woman who has been homeless for at least half her life. She started using opiates either before or after she started doing sex work, and whichever happened in what order almost doesn’t matter anymore. She lives with a parent and other extended family, usually buried deep in Tacoma green spaces. She and her family get swept by the “heal” team, all their possessions trashed, forced to leave their camp and relocate every few months, like clockwork. Every time I see her, she looks less alive. She and her family have no trust in systems, in men, in anything or anyone but each other. Yet she’s always so happy to see me and my outreach partner, graciously receives whatever survival supplies we have to offer her, and always asks for a bus ticket to come see us at the community resource center. She rarely comes, but she always asks. Also, she asks for a way out of homelessness. We haven’t been able to get that done. The excuses abound: the windows for substance use treatment are small and restrictive, and her stuff is always getting thrown away, and I keep losing her in sweeps, and she keeps losing herself to trauma, and she won’t go anywhere without her family. They who keep her safe, while she earns them money. And it’s no fault of hers that I don’t have a detox bed and treatment facility with an available post-treatment program apartment for her and her entire extended family. So I always give her a bus ticket and tell her to come visit me, and hope I can find her again the next week. Hope she’s still alive to be found.
If there was a place she and her family were allowed to be homeless until me and my outreach partner could find them a way not to be, we would figure it out. We could build our plan while not having to chase them around South Tacoma. We could find programs and phones and make appointments and maybe one day this child would find a new normal. She, who had to do adult work far before she was grown, unconscionable horrifying shit that will never soak up, maybe she could have a chance to be a 20-year-old kid again. Or we could arrest her. Again. Again.
Because making homelessness a crime punishable by imprisonment and enforcing those laws rigorously may decrease homelessness. We can choose to pay for prisons instead of housing, shelter and hope. This is an available societal choice. We could build another privatized and secure compound, one whose primary function is to hold captive those have-nots who get caught trying to survive where the haves don’t want them. We could just arrest them all. Zoning for that is already good to go actually, in the tide flats right next to the Northwest Detention Center. Tacoma’s already got one privatized and secure compound whose primary function is holding captive humans caught trying to survive where those in power do not want them. We could choose to double down on tyranny, on class warfare, on social Darwinism.
Or we could choose to provide opportunity, intentional and available resource-filled low-barrier spaces where our lived experience community leads us into connection and sustainability. We can choose a way forward that leans into our humanity. The people can get the people. I would argue that it is our moral imperative.
Every now and then while doing street outreach, I run into a young Black man from my past I’m going to call D. D’s dad showed up at the young adult shelter I worked at in 2019, demanding to talk to someone about his son. Said it in such a way that someone came and got me because they thought there was going to be trouble. Sometimes there’s trouble. I went outside, introduced myself, and he handed over his son. D’s dad said he lived at a shelter for grown men, and his son didn’t need to be there. He told D to go inside and do what he was told. Once his son went inside, the bravado dissipated and he cried. Weeping, barely able to get the words out, he asked me to promise him I’d make sure his son finished high school. I told him I’d do my best, and I did. D went to school most every day he was supposed to and graduated that June. We had a little graduation party in the homeless shelter. It was a nice moment. However, D still lives outside. Or in jail, sometimes. No longer a boy. Now fully a grown-ass man. Every once in a great while, I even see D’s dad. Still on the streets. It makes me want to weep, but all I’ve got left to cry is dust. Because I know back in 2019, D’s dad lost his housing over like 1100 dollars in back rent he couldn’t pay, and in the 6 years since then, while D and his dad suffered separately outside, I bet twenty, maybe fifty times that amount has been spent sheltering, sweeping, incarcerating and attempting to intervene in their homelessness. To no avail. It’s all dust.
PART IV
At a system level, it is far less expensive to prevent a household from becoming homeless than it is to pay for all the impacts of homelessness and eventually get them back out of homelessness. Everybody knows this. And, to use the tub analogy, turning off the faucet as best we can is a pretty important part of cleaning up the water spilling out. If the way forward includes pulling homeless service providers out of the machine, then standing up social housing, community land trusts, and universal basic income have to be on the long-term agenda. But in the meantime, how about we pour every available resource into keeping housing insecure households from becoming homeless. And this is not a particularly complicated nor controversial way forward. It is about as common sense as sense gets.
The tired-ass argument against making homeless prevention funding widely available is that same rehashed, racist, and classist rhetoric used to deride all public welfare programs. That if a service provider pays for someone’s back rent once, they’ll always have to pay for it. That if society provides handouts to poor people, the poor people will become entitled and lose their incentive to be productive members of society. That they won’t appreciate what they didn’t earn, and so will waste it on nonessentials. And that story every white person (who isn’t racist, mind you) has at the ready about standing in line at the store and watching a person (whose race isn’t important, mind you) use their EBT card to buy 5 separate pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. As if poor non-white people shouldn’t be allowed to eat ice cream. As if paying a comparatively small amount to keep a human being from becoming homeless isn’t a worthy and fiscally responsible societal investment. As if making that investment once (or twice or four or five times) doesn’t make good fiscal and ethical sense. As if the productivity of communities shouldn’t be measured in that community’s ability to keep its population housed. As if the only way to produce in society is labor exchanged for buying power exchanged for stability. As if the only reason society does not collapse into itself is the plastic belief that money will save us. It isn’t an argument of prudence, and it never has been. It’s an argument of power.
If our way forward is to have any hope of achieving the abolition of poverty, locally and nationally, capitalism cannot be the ruling modality of the homeless service sector. I know this sounds like the sort of shit faux-intellectual, fresh out of college, clove smokers fart out their mouths. That makes it no less true. The most well-intentioned, mission-oriented homeless service providers grow because they are good and then, eventually, that growth causes them to turn into useless tits. They exchange connection for outcomes, change their sustainability goals from that of the community to that of the company, fall prey to the siren call of empire building, lose their accountability to the people they exist to serve, and instead defer to the executives who make a business out of it. Over and over again. I have worked inside the belly of the beast, nonprofits modeled on corporate principles, the homeless industrial complex, for most of my adult life. We are a fucking disaster.
This is how it happens: Non-profits in the homeless service sector start with a mission, a shared vision of how they are uniquely qualified to do a particular thing for their target population. They hire staff who believe in the mission and want to do the particular thing for the target population and maybe they do it. If they prove needed and successful, they are awarded funding, usually public funding, which they use to hire more staff to do the particular thing for the target population. Repeat, repeat. Soon, they need a management layer or two to manage all of the staff hired to do the particular thing for the target population. Then an accounting team to manage the public money coming in and out and a human resource team to handle the hiring, firing, internal policies, insurance and liability of the rapidly growing nonprofit. Eventually, a director-level to head each department and a public relations team to pay attention to the reputation and messaging of the nonprofit, and finally a development team to ensure the money needed to support what’s become a giant glut of staff, the majority of which are not actually doing the particular thing for the target population that the nonprofit was created to do. Soon they are years into acceptable mission drift and chasing contracts, professionals at manufacturing numbers, fundraising galas, and kissing politician ass, and one day they look up and their soul-baby is now a giant ass nonprofit that exists simply to keep existing. These are who suck up all the public funding intentionally budgeted to offer homeless humans a path out of homelessness, and they are why so little of those funds make it into the hands of people living on the street. This is what happens when you model the nonprofit sector on for-profit corporations. It is the way of capitalism. We must eventually find a whole new way forward.
Quite possibly, the way has already existed here for thousands of years. The tradition of Potlatch, as explained to me, was celebrated by the Coast Salish people as a practice of wealth redistribution. Honor and status were not a corollary of how much one possessed, but how much one could give away. As opposed to empty land acknowledgements, as opposed to just words, we could honor the generous people with action; we could step into the indigenous practice of Potlatch at a civic level. Imagine if Tacoma’s highest earners, companies, and individuals, intentionally stewarded community instead of wealth, if they made their legacy one of generosity instead of accumulation, if they viewed their responsibility to successive generations not in terms of insuring enough money is hoarded to maintain power, but instead in terms of creating a connected and sustainable future. A yacht and vacation-home-free society, but one where everyone has a roof over their head. And together we ebb and together we flow. It is not beyond our capability as humans. There was a time when leadership meant more than ownership, when power was built relationally, and by giving it back.
Be that as it may, and it may be a whole other essay, I do have one more and final way forward to offer: vote. Nationally and locally. Please vote. Even in a system where proficiency at fundraising and access to wealth largely determine the candidate pool, who we pick matters. Silong Chhun and Zev Cook are people who are worth picking. Vote for them. During the coldest part of last winter, Zev Cook showed up in the middle of the night to help open an impromptu shelter at Common Good Tacoma, a shelter completely staffed by volunteers to ensure no one from the neighborhood died outside. Zev showed up multiple nights and offered her labor because her community needed it. Later that spring in March, the City of Tacoma’s “heal” team swept a camp in South Tacoma and in the process, towed away a trailer with an almost 80-year-old man still sleeping inside it. I knew the man from doing outreach in that area, knew he was a Cambodian refugee who had no local family, spoke very little English and didn’t trust anyone. A friend reached out to Silong Chhun, and he showed up. Silong joined me while outreaching, acting as a translator, spoke to the injured and disoriented elder at length and in multiple locations, in his own language and helped convince him to trust our process. That man, partially due to Silong’s efforts, is no longer homeless. Both Zev and Silong show up when community needs them. Without pay, without publicity, they just do what needs doing. They are not just talking, they’re walking. I can vote for that. And I would be remiss if I did not add a word about the mayor’s race. John Hines authored the camping ban, effectively making it illegal to be homeless in Tacoma. Anders Ibsen is talking about using empty government-owned land to house people. Those are two really different positions. The people we vote for in November have the ability to set in motion a new way forward. Vote. Nationally and locally. Please vote.
I began this essay at the start of August and now it’s October. Today my outreach partner and I watched a homeless couple we know get caught stealing two bags full of clothes and shoes at a second hand store. The woman kept saying “I already paid, cashier got it wrong” as she bee-lined to her car. A staff member followed two steps behind her saying “I watched you not pay and there are cameras recording, both inside and now, in the parking lot, recording you steal those bags of unpaid for items and getting into your car.”
The car was dirty, faded white, early nineties, crumbling, paint almost gone in spots and when she started it up the exhaust had that distinct missing-a-muffler roar. It roared all the way down the street as she drove away. But I knew her. I knew her and her husband and their three kids all lived in that piece of shit car. I also knew her husband was probably still inside, pretending he had a way to pay for whatever he had, waiting for his chance to bolt. So I went in and bought the clothes he was holding. It was three kids coats, a couple kid’s shirts and a single pair of man-sized used shoes. It cost less than twenty dollars.
While I was inside, my outreach partner watched the thief, who was also a good mother, making the best of the choices available to her, return and roll down the window and hand the bags to the staff member who was still standing there in the parking lot. He heard her apologize and say her kids need school clothes and she had no way to buy them. The staff member looked in the bag, pulled out three carefully selected outfits of newish looking clothes and three matching pairs of shoes in the other bag.
Me and her husband came out the door right in time to see that staff member stuff the clothes back in the bags and gave them back to her and tell her not to worry about it. Those parents of three children who all live in a small shitty car together, then drove off loudly, embarrassed, but with their heads held high, having got done what needed doing for their kids that day. Me and my outreach partner walked away in silence, feeling the weight of it all in our hearts.
The bile and stink of contradiction that we tolerate to exist right now, of grocery shopping and PTA meetings and just putting our head down to get through each day; this is the heaviness, the tension we are feeling. Our societal ills are not meant to be ignored. We ought not look away from our homeless neighbors suffering in plain sight. We should not be ok with our immigrant families removing their kids from school to avoid deportation. We cannot remain silent while Israel clears out Gaza and Trump sends soldiers to police our city streets and all our Trans siblings are forcibly stuffed back into closets. Tyranny takes hold when we allow it to. Fight injustice everywhere and when the load gets heavy, hold on to each other. We are all we got but god damn it, we are enough.
The way forward is getting rid of the “heal” team and offering homeless folks a service flooded space to exist and doubling down on prevention dollars. And permanent supportive housing and treatment beds and living wage jobs. But also, it’s us. Because it shouldn’t be this hard. I’m neither rich nor a saint, but I need you to know I regularly buy gas for people living in their cars out of my own pocket. Meals for people I know are hungry. As a homeless outreach worker, I feel compelled to acknowledge this shit. Because I know many of us frontline folks do it, spend our own not-enough-money on our neighbors in need. And we hide it because we’ve had all this training from our corporate-capitalist-nonprofit systems about boundaries and self-care. Mother fucker, it shouldn’t be this hard! There are people under the rubble, and this will not soak up! We cannot talk about boundaries and self-care while there is no possible way for our neighbors, our siblings, our people to have the same. This is our work. We are the connectors and the larger our we gets, the closer we get to sustainability. That’s the way forward and that has always been the way forward and it will remain so indefinitely. The people got the people because, quite literally, we are all we got! And we are enough.
