February 2023

In this issue:

You helped improve people's lives in 2022
Ask the experts--our clients

"I love the quietness and the ability to have a place to call home. I still believe I am in a dream, but do not want to wake up from it for the fear of losing this gift. Words cannot express how grateful I am."--a tenant new to PSH in 2022

You helped improve people's lives in 2022

In the photo: DESC staff prep volunteers at The North Star.--courtesy of Tosin Arasi

People in casual summer clothing sit on chairs in a long foyer space listening to a man who is pointing behind them. All wear face masks. The walls are bright spring green, the floor is made of brown tile and a long window lines a wall behind them.

Before we get too settled into 2023, we want you to know how you helped improve lives throughout 2022. Your donations, advocacy and volunteering enabled DESC to provide more permanent and temporary homes, health care and crisis services for more people who really need them. Here are just some of the new and expanded programs that are better serving our community:

Emergency and permanent supportive housing in 2022

Hobson Place 2 Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), new apartments for 92 people opened in January 2022.
Green Lake PSH, 124 affordable apartments under construction since February.
The Gateway in Honor of Tenaya Wright, emergency housing for the 135 people who had been living at the Renton hotel shelter, opened in June. This was the final step in moving away from the large congregate shelter model.
The North Star Permanent Supportive Housing, homes for 100 people opened in August.
Prep work began on the 95-apartment Woodland PSH, in August, with demolition done by November.
The purchase of the Burien property in February 2022 allowed demolition of an old building and construction of 95 homes to begin now.
The 15th Ave W property was acquired in November for construction of 105 new apartments beginning in September 2023.
PSH tenants now have additional help maintaining their apartments and passing their room inspections with the support of the new Unit Conditions Response Team.
Over 1,100 Housing First advocates from around the world learned from each other as DESC hosted the sixth Housing First Partners Conference in April, and in Seattle for the first time.

Clinical programs

The Clinic at Hobson Place provides "one-stop shopping" for case management and health care. And that can mean greatly improved quality of life for those who also live there.

An exam room at The Clinic at Hobson Place before the grand opening.

A white-walled exam room includes some medical instruments on the wall, and medium brown faux wood cabinets, white sink and cream-colored counter.

The Clinic at Hobson Place began providing DESC behavioral health services in February, and in partnership with Harborview Medical Center, began offering outpatient primary care in March.
The clinical department was reorganized into two distinct divisions: outpatient behavioral health, and crisis and mobile response, each led by an associate director.
Residents in Permanent Supportive Housing and Emergency Housing who experience behavioral health crises now get help faster with the dedicated Mobile Response Team (MRT).
In order to respond quicker to crises on King County streets, the Mobile Crisis Team (MCT) expanded capabilities in our south and north region teams.
Washington state adopted DESC's Homeless Outreach Stabilization and Transition (HOST) model for state-wide implementation.
DESC and UW Medicine's HaRRT Center extended the LEAP program to 10 DESC sites in 2022, focused on meaningful activity and other supports to aid in tenant pathways to recovery reduction in harm from substance use.

Supporting staff

Along with other service providers, we advocated with public officials for better pay for frontline workers.
We enhanced support to equity work and initiatives, including restructuring the Equity and Social Justice team.
Under the new Drop-in, Employment and Engagement team DESC created, hired and trained the SAGE milieu and client engagement specialist team.

Two women in business clothes, wearing face masks, sit behind name placards at a table covered in a fruit-motif tablecloth. Interior office windows behind them feature posters that say "Essential work, essential workers." Their eyes smile behind their masks.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and Representative and DESC Deputy Director for Strategy Nicole Macri listen to testimony highlighting the importance of people working in the homeless and housing sector, and the need for them to be paid a living wage. The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness (SKCCH) held the discussion in The North Star in August.

A tall blond man in a casual black jacket and white face mask, takes notes on a clipboard he holds.

John Putre, an architect with SMR, takes feedback from clients at Interbay.

Ask the experts--our clients!

If you are building apartments, why not ask the experts--the tenants--how to improve them?

That's what DESC's Property Development Team and SMR Architects did recently, when they visited DESC's Interbay Place to ask tenants' opinions on everything from counter space, windows and ranges to TV and respite rooms... Read more here.

DESC in the news

How Washington Plans to Fix the Behavioral Health Crisis. The Stranger. Crisis care, not jail. “Jail is fundamentally not a therapeutic environment,” he (Daniel Malone) said. “We shouldn’t bring [people] to jail to get them care. People, in our experience, do much, much better when they have genuine care and support provided to them, not when they’re receiving condemnation and coercion.”
Puget Sounders who brighten our community. Seattle Times’ annual roundup names “Naomi Morris, with other front-line psychiatric nurses at the Downtown Emergency Service Center, ministers to one of Seattle’s most challenging populations: People who are mentally ill and often severely addicted.”
12/23/22—Jayapal Votes for Domestic Spending Package Funding Critical Government Services, Brings $33 Million Back to Seattle. Jayapal media release. Among the funding approved is “$985,000 for Safety, Health, and Hygiene Upgrades at Kerner-Scott House, Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC).”
Stipend for WA homeless-service workers has provided $10.7M so far. Crosscut. State Rep. Macri sponsored the stipend program legislation and aims to secure “permanent increases in state contracts for homeless-service providers” in the 2023 session.
New Seattle UNIQLO store draws crowds and donates warm clothes. Seattle Refined. Mentions that when the new Seattle location opened, the brand made a cold-weather donation to DESC.
“Invest in crisis response for people living with psychiatric conditions,” Seattle Times. Daniel’s op-ed about the urgent need to expand the crisis response system to immediately respond and care for clients, provide adequate structural and financial support to employees doing this very intense work and build and implement ways to prevent these crises from developing.

Thank you for being part of the solution.

You gave $1,019,628 of our $1 million goal in

the end-of-the-year fundraiser!

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