Zeke Smith: Building blocks for addressing homelessness: Takeaways from Camp Hope
By Zeke Smith
Camp Hope was established in December 2021 following a visible protest outside Spokane City Hall to the lack of shelter, housing and services available for the homeless in our community.
What began with almost 100 of our homeless neighbors occupying a single city block in the East Central Neighborhood along I-90, grew to more than 600 people.
Over 18 months, residents of the state’s single-largest homeless encampment endured weather extremes and bluster, disdain and antagonistic behavior from local government officials. No one involved anticipated it would take as long as it did to clear the encampment in a safe manner. And yet, Camp Hope was officially closed on June 9.
While clearing the encampment was no small feat, it created an opportunity to pilot a safe, humane, replicable and sustainable method for tackling homelessness.
The heartbeat of this work was a collaborative network of organizations led by Jewels Helping Hands, Compassionate Addiction Treatment, Revive Counseling Spokane, the Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium, Catholic Charities, the State Departments of Commerce and Transportation, other local service providers, and countless volunteers. All told, results include:
- 175-plus camp residents housed
- 150-plus camp residents employed
- 467 original camp residents connected with care and services
- 376 new permanent and transitional housing beds
While significant, Camp Hope’s closure does not symbolize an end to homelessness in our community. Homelessness is a growing problem in our region. This won’t change without more significant collaboration and coordination of services, funding and accountability. Camp Hope provides lessons that we should apply as a blueprint within our broader homeless and housing services continuum:
1. We are better together. Camp Hope closed thanks to unprecedented partnership and collaboration between local service providers, state agencies and our broader nonprofit community. Energy and local resources were wasted on bickering and conflict as local government officials created obstacles to success and desperately worked to control the narrative by spreading lies and half-truths. Moving forward, only through putting politics aside will we be able to harness the collective spirit, energy and resources required to address the complex issues homelessness creates in our community.
2. Centering those most affected gets real results. Camp Hope service providers deployed a proven peer navigation model where individuals who have experience with homelessness act as the primary guide for clients in navigating our complex housing systems. Additionally, many Camp Hope residents were invited to be part of the solution by employing them in supporting their neighbors and facilitating the closure of the camp. Solutions designed by and with those closest to the issue works. It worked at Camp Hope, it’s working across the country and it must be at the heart of any solution to addressing homelessness here.
3. We need as many different options as there are stories from our homeless neighbors. Safely closing Camp Hope required creating diverse new housing and services that didn’t exist before. For example, the Catalyst Project and the wraparound supports it provides in a sustaining transitional housing environment represent a game-changer in our community for decades to come. The new sobering unit opened by Compassionate Addiction Treatment represents 16 critically necessary beds for helping people gain independence from substance use. Congregate shelter space like the TRAC Shelter can keep people safer, but it doesn’t move them into housing by itself. Only by providing a variety of housing options joined with wraparound services to meet acute issues will we be able to move people sustainably off the streets.
4. Homeless people are our neighbors. Time and again, surveys of our homeless population show that they are overwhelmingly from our community. This was true of the Camp Hope population where over 85% of those surveyed indicated their last housed location was in Spokane County. Given this, we have a collective responsibility as a community to address this issue. It is our problem and only through local ingenuity and collaboration will we resolve it.
Camp Hope brought to light the critical nature of our community’s homelessness crisis. If the past 18 months reinforced anything, it’s that true solutions to big issues are best solved when we’re working together. We now have a blueprint and a strong and unified service provider community standing ready to work alongside local leaders to build a safe, humane and sustainable solution to homelessness. On Wednesday, when local leaders share a plan for a regional homelessness authority,
I will be advocating for these lessons to be integrated into the plan. I hope you will join me.Zeke Smith is president of Empire Health Foundation in Spokane.