This summer, one of King County’s largest young adult homelessness service providers announced the closure of two transitional housing programs, one day center and a shifting of its shelter services. By the end of the year, the nonprofit, YouthCare, estimates 13 people will be laid off as a result and 20 others reassigned.
It’s rare that homelessness organizations announce big cuts, but what has plagued YouthCare, its CEO Degale Cooper said, is widespread across organizations working in homelessness in the region and beyond. It’s a combination of government-funded social service contracts regularly falling short and repercussions of pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act funding going away.
In 2021, the federal $1.9 trillion pandemic relief program allowed homeless services nonprofits to fund programs they had always dreamed of, expand their offerings to get closer to meeting the scale of need and shore up staffing and support. It also kept people from entering homelessness amid mass furloughs, layoffs and economic uncertainty.
“We were able to deploy funding at a scale that was significantly changed because the federal government stepped in,” said Kelly Rider, director of King County’s Department of Community and Human Services.
But now, all of King County’s relief dollars have to be contracted by the end of this year, and many organizations have already spent down their award.
Many say they are hopeful their work will be prioritized in next year’s Seattle city budget, but the city is staring down a substantial budget deficit and the state’s homelessness funding is facing a serious shortfall. Additionally, it’s highly unlikely the federal government will commit added money to supporting this work under Donald Trump’s presidency next year, based on his first-term policies and campaign rhetoric.
YouthCare used its federal funding to open a shelter in South Seattle, transferring shelter guests from its Denny Triangle-based Orion Center to where it saw increased need, and expand its services in the University District. Their 20 shelter beds in South Seattle were consistently full, Cooper said, during its three-year existence.
Now, YouthCare is disbanding pretty much all of the additions it made. At the beginning of this month, YouthCare moved its 20 shelter beds from South Seattle back to the Orion Center, Cooper said.
“We really tried to be very strategic, and take a very business-oriented approach to realigning YouthCare to its mission so that we could keep our doors open, now and in the future,” said Cooper.
Africatown Community Land Trust’s President and CEO K. Wyking Garrett said the organization is still using its federal dollars to support its shelter for men, called Benu Community Home, in Seattle’s Central District.
That money will run out next month. And if Africatown isn’t able to secure $2 million to maintain its current budget, it could have to reduce the number of people the shelter can help at once, said Muammar Hermanstyne, real estate and development consultant for Africatown.
“We are hopeful that our efforts will yield positive results, but we are also preparing for the possibility of having to scale back our initiatives,” said Hermanstyne.
On the other hand, Friends of Youth, which operates the only young adult shelter to East King County, used its federal aid to experiment with a shelter model it had always wanted to try but never had the financial freedom to test.
It turned its overnight shelter, which used to make guests leave by 8 a.m. daily, into a 24-7 shelter. It hired staff to fill the extra shifts and used the additional dollars to cover the added utility and supplies costs.
Their extra funding will run out next month. But the nonprofit’s board already decided the gains it had made were too great to turn back, said CEO Paul Lwali.
“That was the right thing to do for our clients,” Lwali said. “Quite frankly we had to fundraise a lot more.”
Friends of Youth was able to get additional operational funding from local Eastside city governments, including Kirkland, and capital donations to open a new shelter building from large donors, such as Microsoft and Amazon, to continue its enhanced shelter model to better meet the needs of its 18- to 24-year-old clients. As a result, they’ve been able to use the momentum to transition out of Friends’ former shelter location, which was only able to hold 15 at once, to a Kirkland site that can hold up to 35 guests.
The light-filled building includes a commercial kitchen, a full-time chef that prepares homemade meals and a cozy dining area, where guests gather together.
“We treat this place as their home,” said Modou Nyang, senior director of Homeless Youth Services for Friends of Youth.
There are rooms for caseworkers to meet with clients, a medically outfitted space for young people to meet with a nurse regularly and semiprivate nooks with walls that don’t touch the ceiling that each contain one twin bed for sleeping.
“When clients come in there’s a certain level of immediate comfort and security and safety that they feel,” said David Farr, manager of drop-in services for the new site.
Not every organization used their federal dollars to build something new.
Some, like the YWCA Seattle King County Snohomish, used it to boost established services.
The YWCA directed a lot of its $3.2 million allocation to respond to an increase in calls they were receiving from people in need of rental assistance, utility assistance, motel vouchers, food assistance and help covering medical bills, Mary Anne Dillon said, vice president of programs for the YWCA.
Today, more than four years since the pandemic began, Dillon said, it’s evident that “people can’t catch up.”
“People are still calling us,” she said. “If we were to get another infusion of (American Rescue Plan Act) dollars or any other kind of dollars, the community could really use it.”
Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, sees the federal government’s response to COVID-19 as an example of what it looks like when our government treats something as a true crisis.
And he sees nonprofits around the country struggling with the same issues as Seattle’s now that the federal aid is running out.
“Some places were able to use the successes they had had as a way to sort of raise other money, which is great, but that’s not happening everywhere,” Berg said.
Following the pandemic, some local homelessness organizations say fundraising to fill the gaps has become harder.
YouthCare has seen a decrease in private donations, CEO Cooper said.
“I think that there’s been a lot of compassion fatigue around homelessness, just in general,” Cooper said.
Inflation and a rising cost of living in the greater Seattle area have added extra strain to already limited budgets.
“Those costs keep rising, but the government contracts do not rise at the same pace,” said YWCA’s Dillon. “So, we really do rely on the sort of generosity of our community.”
Berg said the reliance on generous donors, both large and small, to keep homelessness service providers a float is “virtually universal” across the country, leaving many service providers at possible risk of having their critical services shut down.
“This whole effort on homelessness around the country is always dealing with not enough money to actually do the job,” Berg said.
