Editorial: Housing Hope’s ‘Stone Soup’ recipe for community

By The Herald Editorial Board

The folktale of “Stone Soup” — shared in various traditions — tells of travelers to a town who, to encourage villagers to share their food, let slip their recipe for stone soup, tossing a rock into a large pot and persuading the locals to improve on the soup’s flavor with their own ingredients.

Housing Hope, founded in Snohomish County in 1987, has for many years used the Stone Soup folktale as a touchstone for its annual fundraising event, held last week at the Tulalip Resort.

The event helps support work that has allowed the nonprofit to build, own and operate 652 units of affordable apartments at 25 locations throughout the county and build 328 households for homeowners through its “sweat equity” Team Homebuilding program.

Additionally, its HopeWorks enterprises, which will merge this July with Housing Hope, operates four social enterprise businesses — Renew Home & Decor, Kindred Kitchen, Tomorrow’s Hope Child Development Center and Ground Works Landscaping — that provide real-world job training for Housing Hope residents.

Along with fundraising, the evening is an opportunity to recognize those who work, volunteer and partner with the nonprofit.

Chris Gray was presented with the Edwin R. Petersen Award. Over the past 12 years, Gray has served as board chair and chair of the Monroe family village task force and on the organization’s public policy committee, and has drawn from her background in K-12 education to advise Housing Hope’s new Tomorrow’s Hope child development center.

Jerron Craig, a Housing Hope instructor since 2018, was recognized as Employee of the Year.

Connie Janke, a volunteer since 2014, was awarded the Volunteer of the Year Award. Janke joined the organization’s east county board in 2018, advocating for Kindred Kitchen, Ground Works and other programs that work to build skills and confidence for program clients.

Community Health Center of Snohomish County, which helped open a dedicated health center at Housing Hope’s new Madrona Highlands facility in Edmonds and will operate a similar facility at the planned Scriber Place housing development in Lynnwood, was presented with the Community Partner Award.

The evening was also a homecoming for the evening’s keynote speaker, Michael Larson. Larson, founder and executive director of a Portland, Ore., nonprofit organization, Humans for Housing, grew up in Everett and graduated from Everett High School. He and two siblings were foster children in seven different homes until their joint adoption in 2012.

Larson and his brother and sister were featured in The Herald in 2022 regarding a scholarship they founded for Black students and students who have been in foster care.

That concern for community continues through Humans for Housing, with a mission to tell the stories of those in the homeless community through documentary films, outreach and advocacy for stable housing.

Larson, a Gonzaga University graduate in sociology, began advocating for foster children and those experiencing homelessness in Spokane, organizing marches, volunteering at a shelter and directing a documentary, “Humanizing Spokane,” which told the stories of four homeless individuals.

More recently, Larson has produced a Portland-based documentary, “No Place to Grow Old,” which focuses on three seniors in the homeless community who are 55 years and older, a quickly growing segment of that population.

“While these stories are based in Portland, these are the stories of people in every city across the country. These are the stories of people in Snohomish County, people just like them that Housing Hope gets to serve,” he said.

Larson showed the documentary’s trailer, which included brief interviews from its three main subjects: Bronwyn, Jerry and Herbert.

“A lot of these places are going up; they cost too much to afford the rent,” says Herbert in the documentary.

“They think we’re out her because we’re stupid or we’re drug addicts or whatever,” says Jerry. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

“I am someone, you know,” says Bronwyn. “I’m someone’s daughter, I’m someone’s wife, I’m someone’s mom, I’m someone’s sister, you know, just because I was homeless, you know, didn’t erase any of that.”

“These stories matter,” Larson said, at the conclusion of the trailer. “It’s what allows us to become proximate, to realize that these are real people, and all of us need stable housing.”

Larson noted that a University of Pennsylvania researcher predicted in 2019 that the population of older homeless individuals is expected to triple by 2030.

At the start of the year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, noted that about 1 in 5 of those experience homelessness were adults, 55 and older, a 6 percent increase from 2023.

The health and mobility issues of many older adults further complicate the difficulties of homelessness, making it hard to get access at shelters and get the personal assistance they may need for eating and hygiene.

“To bring this a little bit closer to home, in Snohomish County in 2024 with the Point in Time Count, homelessness actually went down in 2024 about 10 percent but homelessness of the age of people who are 55 and older still grew,” Larson said. “So this is something that isn’t just happening in Portland, Ore., but is very much felt here in Everett and here in Snohomish County.”

Earlier this year, Housing Hope was announced as the recipient of state and federal grants that will help it build 66 units of senior housing for those at various levels of need at 2624 Rockefeller Avenue, 60 one-bedroom and six two-bedroom, with construction scheduled to start in 2026. The $39.4 million project received a $3.9 million state grant and another $1.05 million federal grant.

Yet, much of the project will rely on additional community support, a gathering of ingredients for the organization’s stone soup.

Larson, in appealing for support of Housing Hope, challenged community members to see those coping with homelessness and struggling to avoid it as individuals.

“The moment we start to see people and their stories and their humanity, that’s the moment where things really start to change,” Larson said.