The More We Love got a contract to create a “receiving center” for women leaving the sex trade last year. Women who lived and worked there say the shelter offered few services and exposed some of its clients to harm.
By Erica C. Barnett
In June 2025, a local activist named Kristine Moreland brought several former sex workers who got shelter through her Kirkland-based nonprofit, The More We Love, to tell their stories in council chambers. The presentation, in then-Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s human services committee, served as a soft launch Moreland’s latest project—a motel-based shelter in Renton Moreland said could serve as a “receiving center” with wraparound services for women leaving the sex trade.
The conversation quickly became emotional. Moreland wept through most of her introductory comments, and Moore addressed the women through sobs.
Moreland told the committee that The More We Love’s approach is unique because, unlike other providers, the group and its staff serve as a “constant” for each woman they serve, working alongside them from the moment they make the decision to leave their pasts behind. “We’re not just responding—we’re building outcomes that change lives, and we do it by being people’s constants in a world that so often turns its back,” Moreland said, her voice insistent and serious. “We show up over and over again, we listen, we stay, we love people where they are, and we walk with them towards where they’re going—not perfectly, but faithfully.”
The women who came with Moreland praised her effusively. “You made me a better woman because you showed me how to be,” one told Moreland. “You open your arms and I fall apart every time because of my angels from The More We Love.”
Council member Moore, apologizing for losing her composure, said, “It’s just—your stories are so compelling, and we lose them so often. We lose these sight of who’s out there in the work that we’re doing. Sorry. I’m so grateful, so grateful.”
The previous year, as a companion to controversial legislation creating a new Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone on Aurora Ave. N, where street sex work is common, Moore had secured $2 million in the budget to fund services and shelter for women leaving the sex trade. But then she did something unorthodox.
Established service providers were in the middle of drafting proposals for funding when Moore halted the competitive bidding process and awarded $1 million directly to The More We Love in March 2025. According to the group’s contract, the shelter program was supposed to offer “wraparound stabilization services,” including “survivor-led programming, peer mentorship, job training, financial planning, and referrals to long-term housing, treatment, and legal support.”‘
The contract didn’t get going until June 2025. (For that reason, the final award was closer to $600,000). By December, the city had placed a “pause” on enrollment in the program so HSD could look into the group’s compliance with basic city requirements, including record-keeping and confidentiality standards. According to a spokeswoman for the city’s Human Services Department, the city “found the shelter to be out of compliance in 13 areas of the Washington Administrative Code (WAC) and contract requirements.”
Moreland, who responded to our request for an interview with a lengthy email, characterized the city’s review as a routine “contractual ‘comprehensive review,'” not an investigation, and provided a compliance letter from HSD in which the department said The More We Love had corrected “most areas we found to be noncompliant.” However, HSD also noted in that letter that the department would continue to bar new enrollments in the program because it was “unable to verify areas of non-compliance before the end of the contract period.”
But the issues with The More We Love’s shelter program appear to run deeper than a mere failure to comply with the city’s basic requirements. In recent months, PubliCola has spoken to nearly a dozen people who worked for, lived in, or volunteered at the shelter who said they became disillusioned with the program after realizing how far it fell short of its lofty goals. Far from being each woman’s “constant,” they said, Moreland and her staff left women and their kids living in isolated motel rooms without the case management, counseling, and resources they needed to succeed.
Moreland won her first government contract largely through persistence. A charismatic, photogenic woman with an ear for soundbites, Moreland was a Kirkland mortgage broker and Union Gospel Mission volunteer when she started to pitch herself as a homeless service provider in 2023.
At the time, Moreland faced a number of legal and financial challenges: She owed the state of Washington at least $24,000 in unpaid fees and penalties related to a settlement of charges that she violated the state Consumer Lending Act, and had failed to pay at least $33,000 in credit card debt, resulting in a legal judgment from King Couny District Court. Two years earlier, she was charged with a DUI and briefly had her driver’s license suspended.
The More We Love didn’t start as a homeless service nonprofit. In its original incarnation, the group—which Moreland initially called the MORELove Project—pitched itself as a provide of private “sweeps,” offering to remove tents and people from business-owned properties for $515 a head.
When the city of Burien began debating how to address encampments in the city, Moreland started showing up at Burien City Council meetings to pitch her group as an effective alternative to traditional homeless service providers. In public comments, she expressed astonishment that other groups, like the established outreach organization REACH, were having such a hard time housing people when she had no trouble at all getting people out of tents and into detox, treatment, and housing.
Conservative Burien councilmembers like Stephanie Mora started pushing The More We Love as an innovative new solution to homelessness in the city. By 2024, Burien had canceled its contract with REACH and given it to Moreland’s group.
Homeless advocates were skeptical about Moreland’s miraculous-sounding claims, but over time, The More We Love became an integral part of Burien’s homeless response. But the More We Love has never released detailed information about its services or success rates, though. For two years, the only data they’ve released consists of a graphics-heavy three-page report that includes high-level numbers, like “303 people served” and “129 resource referrals,” which isn’t sufficient to know where its government funds are going or if they’re producing lasting results.
While she was securing trust and funding in Burien, Moreland was becoming a rising star among right-wing media in Seattle—all too happy to narrate on camera as the Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Choe filmed homeless people in crisis on Third Avenue, or to take center stage in a recent KIRO radio series about a boy who was found living in a tent with his mother.
Despite Moreland’s lack of traditional credentials, some—including representatives from two King County homeless service providers who spoke with PubliCola on background—have praised The More We Love for showing up immediately and getting people into shelter right away, at any time of day or night. They say Moreland has a special skill at convincing unsheltered people to come indoors—a frequent challenge when working with people who have repeatedly been burned by the homelessness system.
One provider said, approvingly, that The More We Love has been able to work closely with the Seattle Police Department to get people off the streets and into shelter instead of taking them to jail. (SPD told PubliCola they no longer refer people to Moreland’s group, but did not say why). That same provider also said Moreland frequently referred drug users to inpatient treatment at Lakeside-Milam, a residential program in Kirkland, making good use of funds former councilmember Sara Nelson earmarked for the private treatment center.
The More We Love’s official address is a private mailbox in Kirkland. Moreland also shares an office with staff at The More We Love’s motel-based shelter in Renton. By all accounts, though, she spends most of her time outside any office—speaking to elected officials, going into encampments, talking to friendly media, and driving people to and from appointments.
“I was just intoxicated”
According to former shelter residents and staffers, Moreland often appeared as a miracle worker in their lives, then seemed to vanish.
Sarah Ann Hamilton, a sex trafficking survivor and longtime advocate who worked as The More We Love’s director of survivor services, first met Moreland at a fundraiser for the Seattle nonprofit Stolen Youth. Hamilton was working for the Organization for Prostitution Survivors in Seattle when Moore approached her about volunteering to help The More We Love with encampment outreach in Burien.
From the beginning, Hamilton said, Moreland made her feel special and chosen—”like it was me and her against everybody.” For a year, Hamilton recalled, she worked for Moreland for free, “just helping people” who were living in encampments until “we got the Burien contract” in 2024 Once that happened, Hamilton quit her job at OPS, ignoring friends and colleagues who warned her to be cautious about Moreland, she said. “All I was seeing was her helping people,” Hamilton said.
Before long, Hamilton had become Moreland’s right-hand woman and a fierce advocate for the new shelter for women leaving the sex trade, which Hamilton said she believed would be survivor-led and survivor-centered. She was at the table when former councilmember Moore burst into tears listening to survivors’ stories, and she thought Moreland saw something in her that other people didn’t.
“She kept telling me, ‘I have a vision that one day you’ll be an executive director,'” Hamilton said. “We started talking about opening up a house [for survivors], and then we came up with the idea of opening up the Sarah Ann House”—a planned women’s shelter that was going to be named after Hamilton. For a while, The More We Love’s website featured photos of Moreland and Hamilton sitting in a porch swing outside the house. But after what Hamilton and a second former volunteer described as a dispute with the owner, the deal fell through.
Chelsea, a former shelter volunteer, said Moreland initially made her feel like the center of the universe too. (Except where last names are provided, all the names in this story are pseudonyms.) The two first met as volunteers at Union Gospel Mission, which runs a nighttime shelter and “search and rescue” program in Seattle. Chelsea was working for another homelessness program, feeling “really burned out,” when Moreland told her she was developing a shelter and counseling program for sex trafficking survivors and thought it would be a great fit for her skills. Chelsea thought her volunteer work would lead to a paying job, but it never did.
Like Hamilton, Chelsea said Moreland made her feel special. “I was just so intoxicated by what she was telling me. We’d go shopping she’d take me out to these fancy dinners and just thought she was magical.” But Chelsea said it wasn’t always easy to stay in Moreland’s good graces. She noticed that the women staying in the shelter, much like Chelsea, became concerned if they didn’t get positive attention from Moreland. “They’re all dependent” on Moreland, Chelsea said. “They really fight to be her favorite, and they’re nervous if they’re not.”
One former shelter resident we spoke to, Monica, was a sex trafficking survivor who had been working around Third and Pike in downtown Seattle when The More We Love picked her up and took her to the shelter. She described a scene of instant, discomfiting intimacy on her first day there. “They were like, ‘I love you, I love you,'” she said. Monica said she had “an immediate love for the shelter” because it was easy to enter, with “absolutely no paperwork,” and because “they came and got me,” along with her dog and teenage daughter, and brought them straight to a motel room.
Lisa, a former shelter resident who ended up there after calling 211, also described her initial experience with shelter staff as strangely intimate. “As soon as you get there, they’re already telling you ‘I love you, I love you so much.’ They say it all the time. … Clearly, they wanted to establish trust quickly.”
But that close-knit feeling cut both ways, Lisa added. “People who were exited from the program or got kicked out—we were not allowed to talk to them or [we felt like] we’d get kicked out too. Who you could talk to was [decided] on a case by case basis—it was very strange and very arbitrary.”
One former sex worker who lived at the shelter for more than six months, Rebecca, also had high hopes for her time with More We Love. After meeting with Moreland, Rebecca quit her part-time job with a homeless service provider in Seattle to take a volunteer position at the shelter that she believed would lead to a paying job as on-site staff. Hamilton was an old friend, from “the life,” she said, so Rebecca trusted her that the job opportunity was legitimate.
“Sarah thought she was the co-founder, and she reached out to me and was like, ‘Who better to lead a survivor-led organization than us?'” Rebecca said. “As soon as the funding came through—as soon as Cathy Moore made the announcement about the million-dollar funding going through to The More We Love—[Moreland] was like, how quickly can you quit your second job?’ She asked me to send her my resume and she said, ‘You’re hired.'”
Rebecca, who was struggling but not homeless at the time, left her housing and moved into one of the rooms at the motel. But instead of a paying position, she said, she ended up cleaning rooms when women left the motel and providing informal counseling to new clients at all hours of the day and night. Apart from the $250 she estimates she received for cleaning five rooms, “I never, ever, ever got paid,” Rebecca said.
Instead of getting the job she had hoped for, Rebecca said she was told she would have to go to residential treatment at a rebab center across the state.It seemed like “a great treatment facility,” Rebecca said, but “treatment isn’t for me.” She left with no money or way back to the Seattle area, and ended up begging her way onto a three-and-a-half-hour bus ride. When she arrived back at the shelter, she was told she was no longer welcome because she didn’t finish treatment.
The More We Love’s contract with Seattle says the program “has high accountability to stay” and that “Survivors who use substances are asked to commit to a pathway towards recovery to stay in the shelter unit” by going to “the appropriate treatment/detox facility.” Although The More We Love’s Seattle contract says they will work with people who don’t immediately get sober “to find next steps after exiting the emergency shelter,” Rebecca said that didn’t happen in her case. For a while, she lived in her car.
“I was the most homeless I’d ever been in my life,” she said. “Mind you, I had a home before I came over there to help them.”
Later, Rebecca said, Moreland and another staffer agreed to meet with her at the shelter to talk. Rebecca drove there on a nearly empty tank of gas, but they never showed. Later, she said, they offered to help her with a rent deposit. That never happened either. “Nothing good has come out of me being introduced to that organization whatsoever,” she said.
Rebecca is no longer homeless. “I am in a place now,” she said, “but I don’t want to give credit to The More We Love, because it wasn’t them. It was me.”
Hamilton, her mother, and a second shelter resident said they a similar situation play out with another woman. PubliCola was unable to speak to her directly, but the women said Moreland described her as The More We Love’s “donation lead” but never formally hired her or paid her for her work. In her email to Moreland and Insalaco, Hamilton said other shelter residents had directed racial slurs the woman, who is Black, and referred to her children as “monkeys”; “No corrective action was taken, and there were no written organizational policies addressing racism at a moral or operational level,” Hamilton wrote.
Hamilton’s mother Karen, who watched Moreland woo her daughter, said falling out of Moreland’s favor “took a big toll” on her. “In front of other people, she would always just praise Sarah to the nines, but when Sarah started to question things, it just became a different story,” Karen Hamilton said. “It really crushed her in terms of, what she thought was going to happen didn’t happen. All of us in her family have just tried to say to her, this was a horrible thing that’s happened and something good will come out of it.”
“Well, what do you offer?”
Chelsea, the volunteer who first met Moreland through UGM, was doing volunteer encampment outreach for The More We Love in Burien, in 2024, when she started hearing complaints about Moreland from people living in tents. They told her Moreland had promised to give them money, services, and rides to appointments, but hadn’t delivered.
“I had clients that I had connected with who were still coming to me, saying things like, ‘Kristine promised she’d help me with a month of sober living,’ or ‘She’s going to pay the vet so I can keep my dog,'” Chelsea recalled. “Another one couldn’t get to a doctor’s appointment. I paid ridiculous amounts for Ubers” to get people to appointments, she said.
As someone trained at her nonprofit day job to provide trauma-informed care, Chelsea said she noticed that Moreland had a one-size-fits-all approach to unsheltered people with addiction, who are often coping with complex trauma: Pick them up, give them a bed, then send them to detox to sink or swim. Detox, unlike treatment, is a brief medical intervention that helps people quit drinking or using drugs in a medically safe environment.
“I noticed that she’d go in and just say ‘detox, detox, detox’ with all these people,” Chelsea said. “I was like, ‘Okay, what do we do after they’re in detox?’ and she was like, ‘Just put them in a rehab.’ She didn’t seem to understand that getting someone to rehab is only the first step” to recovery.
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In one instance, Chelsea recalled creating a “MacGyvered-together plan” for a homeless client that involved going to detox, attending recovery meetings in Seattle, and—most importantly—staying away from Burien, where he was likely to fall back into old patterns of drug use. The plan fell apart, she said, when Moreland decided to let the man visit his girlfriend in Burien instead of going to an AA meeting at Cherry Hall in Seattle.
“She loves the drama and adrenaline” of tracking people down and getting them to agree to services, Chelsea said, but “she wouldn’t follow through on getting the resources that she promised.”
“What she can do is come in a crisis and look like miracle worker, when all she’s doing is throwing people in hotels and detox with no aftercare plan,” Chelsea said. “And when they rely on her, they don’t take the other resources. They’re like, ‘I don’t want the LEAD shelter crap. Kristine’s bringing me a miracle.'”
Martina, a former shelter resident, said she and her children were fleeing domestic violence and had been staying “anywhere we could go, before they received a referral to The More We Love’s shelter. During the weeks her family spent in TMWL’s Renton shelter, she said, “I never was offered any kind of counseling. Mind you, we just left a DV situation—everybody has trauma after something like that.”
Martina also said the shelter was dirty—dirtier than her family was used to even after sleeping on airport floors. She recalled that when she and her to kids arrived at the shelter late one night, “everything [in the room] was so nasty—old food under the bed and they had blood spots on the sheets. It was so filthy.” After arguing with a staff member about whether the blood spots were a sign of bedbugs, Martina and her family were moved, wearing nothing but towels, into another room.
The family left most of their possessions, including Nikes and the kids’ VR headsets, behind in the room for heat treatment. Other than her mother’s ashes and death certificate, and her own high school diploma, Martina said they never saw any of their stuff again. Their new room, while seemingly bedbug-free, didn’t have hot water in the shower, Martina said, so she and her daughters took “bird baths” in the sink.ere
A more troubling issue, Martina said, was that the shelter didn’t feel like a safe or welcoming space for children, with no programming or group activities for the many kids who were living at the shelter when she and her kids stayed there. The shelter consists of a block of rooms in a three-building motel complex next to I-405. The More We Love’s mixed-gender shelter is in a second building, and a third building is a motel open to the general public, with rooms priced at around $45 a night.
“There was no opportunity for the kids at all—everybody’s kids sat in the rooms all day,” she said.
For a shelter that serves vulnerable and trafficked women, the “receiving center” is an unusually public and easily accessible location. Anyone can come and go as they please, Martina said—and they did. “There were people out there fighting drug dealers in the parking lot,” she recalled
Lisa, the former sex worker who said The More We Love love-bombed her when she arrived at the shelter, said she thought it was “really strange” that The More We Love would open a shelter for trafficking survivors at a motel on the side of the highway. When she asked about it, she said, “They were like, ‘We’re hiding in plain sight,’ and I was like, ‘You guys aren’t hidden at all. There are still sex workers who are working out of the other rooms!'”
Two other women each described separate incidents involving men who had access to the shelter. The first involved a maintenance worker who attacked one of the women living there. In the second incident, a man started pounding on a resident’s door and, according to a contemporaneous email documenting what happened, confronted her as she was entering her room, grabbed the items she was carrying, and threw a fire extinguisher at her.
A spokeswoman for the city’s Human Services Department told PubliCola, “We were not informed of other TMWL clients being served at the same location.”
Martina said she was told she’d she get help repairing her credit, getting to job interviews, signing up for Housing Connector (a nonprofit program that connects low-income tenants to private landlords) or providing her kids with supplies to attend school online from their hotel room.
“They were like, ‘We don’t offer that, we don’t offer that.’ And I was like, ‘Well, what do you offer?”
Chelsea said she asked similar question when she was working with Moreland to bring women and families to the shelter. “I’m like, you’re trying to empower them to eventually move out of that place and have the skills to go on with life—where are the programs?”
In fact, every woman PubliCola spoke to who spent time at the shelter, including those who were staying in the “receiving center” rooms and those who ended up there through general shelter referrals, made similar complaints. They expected services, including referrals to housing, clothes for job interviews and counseling to help them with the trauma of exploitative sex work and life on the streets. They knew these were supposed to be part of the program. But they weren’t seeing any of it.
Moreland disputed these accounts, telling PubliCola the shelter program “includes daily access to wraparound services that support stabilization and long-term recovery. This includes one-on-one case management, individualized service planning, and ongoing meetings with case managers to support each woman’s goals and next steps. Participants have access to support groups, recovery-based programming, and parent support groups designed to strengthen family stability and connection. … This work is deeply meaningful, creating space for women to stabilize, engage in recovery, and remain with or be reunited with their children.”
Martina said living at the shelter did had one benefit: It motivated her to get two part-time jobs and find an apartment on her own. “The whole time I was in there it was a living hell, so I ended up calling everywhere every single day. I got in contact with one program, and they were like, ‘We have a one-bedroom apartment,’ and I said, ‘We will take it!'”
“Like a trafficking culture”
Some of the people who volunteered or worked for The More We Love’s shelter for abused and exploited women now say they regret their association with Moreland.
Hamilton said she first began to question The More We Love’s methods after she started working full-time at the shelter, where she said it became harder to ignore the fact that vulnerable women, many of them victims of abuse, were leaving without getting the help they were promised. She said she tried to set up a program that was “survivor-centered—they used that term to get the grant from the city,” and facilitated regular group meetings that the women could attend. Outside those meetings, Hamilton said, the only real programming at the shelter consisted of informal Bible studies and periodic outreach from local church members.
Last May, Hamilton expressed her concerns about the program in a letter to Moreland and The More We Love board member Justin Insalaco, a former police officer who, like Moreland, serves on the board of Crime Stoppers, the group that offers cash rewards for crime tips. In the letter, Hamilton accused Moreland of exploiting the women at the shelter, expecting them to work for free or minimal pay, and failing to fulfill her commitment that the program and shelter would be trauma-informed and survivor-led.
“Kristine, when we started this work together, we said The More We Love was going to be survivor-ran and survivor-led. But if I’m being transparent, that’s not what I’m seeing now,” Hamilton wrote. “It’s starting to feel like something that was said because it looked good on paper, or because it helped with funding—not something we’re actually practicing.”
Hamilton said she became increasingly concerned about how frequently Moreland expected women to share their stories with the strangers she invited to tour the shelter and talk with residents. Former councilmember Moore said it was one of these tours that convinced her that The More We Love was more effective than the other groups that work with women on Aurora Ave. N, and then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert dropped by when he was running for governor in 2024. The following year, Reichert’s campaign donated $25,000 of its surplus funds to The More We Love.
During an interview last December, when Hamilton was still working for The More We Love, she told me that the women would joke that preparing for tours was like getting themselves ready for a john. “When the tours come, the girls literally say, ‘Get ready, we have a date coming,” she said. “They have created this culture that’s like a trafficking culture.”
The second former volunteer, who asked to remain anonymous, told PubliCola,”The way you get the ladies to tell the story is: You put them on the pedestal, you give them the attention, you give them that rush. They’re emotional stories, and it grips the heart and it makes people go, ‘I want to help,’ but we can get so focused on funding that we forget the people we’re helping.”
Moreland also frequently posts photos of clients on her Facebook and Instagram pages and accompanies women who testify in favor of The More We Love, often on camera, using their full names.
Personal success stories have long been a common fundraising tool for human-service nonprofits. But many organizations that work with abused or trafficked women have begun to pull back from this practice on the grounds that it’s hard to do so in a way that isn’t exploitative.
Amarinthia Torres, co-executive director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said “it’s a very big ask” for a survivor to share her story, especially when they’ve just left a violent or coercive situation. “It’s important that we treat then with the utmost respect and really ensure that we’re getting their true and honest permission, and they should be free to say, ‘No, I don’t’ want to do that,’ or ‘I changed my mind’ without the threat of harm or resources being taken away,” Torres said.
Advocates for women leaving abusive situations say it’s critical to create an atmosphere of safety, privacy, and confidentiality so survivors of trafficking and other forms of abuse feel safe and empowered.
“Survivor-driven advocacy”—the kind Hamilton thought she was hired to put in place at the shelter —”is about upholding confidentiality and honoring the self-determination of survivors,” Torres said. “It’s really not just theory, but a practical way to protect [survivors’] safety and also resist abuses of power.” In survivor-driven programs, women have control over their own experiences and private information and can make informed decisions about whether and how to share their personal stories. “It’s core because it’s foundational,” Torres said. You have to meet that foundational threshold first to create safety.”
Hamilton said she also raised concerns with Moreland about client privacy within the shelter—including the fact that, according to Hamilton, case notes and emails discussing the women’s personal health information were widely accessible. She also said Moreland and her two shelter staffers, Stephanie Shields and Carolyn Sand, talked about clients in the presence of other people, including other women who were staying at the shelter. This made women reluctant to complain or bring up issues that were bothering them, Hamilton said, because they couldn’t be sure staffers would keep their private information private.
Martina recalled that Moreland and other staffers “talked about a lot of people in front of me. One of the girls had a brand new newborn and they were talking about how smelly the baby was [and] saying they’re gonna call [Child Protective Services] on her. I went back out of the room with my kids and I said, ‘Just imagine what they’re saying about us if they can talk about a little baby like that.'”
It wasn’t the first time someone had expressed concerns about the group’s commitment to keeping people’s personal information confidential. Back in 2023, Moreland distributed a spreadsheet with detailed medical notes about individual encampment residents to a Burien city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid The More We Love to remove an encampment on his property.
“What if I do have a demon inside me?”
Several women who lived at the shelter said staying there seemed to require participating in Christian religious activities that made them uncomfortable. These practices, they told me, went far beyond optional prayers and Bible study groups.
The More We Love’s “welcome binder” says the group is “not a faith-based organization,” but that they are “proud to have Carolyn, a kind and compassionate spiritual guide,” on staff. “At some of our events and meetings, Carolyn may offer a prayer at the beginning or end,”e the welcome packet continues. “This will always be announced in advance, and if you’re not comfortable being present during that time, you are welcome to step out.”
In her May email to Moreland, Hamilton raised concerns about some of the “fear-based” practices that were introduced by Sand and some of the volunteers who came in from nearby churches, such as telling women they were possessed by demons or had a “spirit of murder” inside them because of past abortions. “I believe faith can be deeply healing,” Hamilton wrote, [b]ut content and delivery must be trauma-informed, survivor-safe, and non-coercive.”
Former shelter resident Lisa, who is Jewish, said The More We Love staff and some of the volunteers raised objections to the way she expressed her faith—seeming particularly offended, she said when she referred to God as “Hashem” and Jesus as “Yeshua,” both Hebrew terms.
The shelter, while not explicitly Christian, included voluntary Bible study groups as well as frequent visits by members from Citadel Church in Des Moines, where Sand is a pastor, and Eden Church in Newcastle. Citadel, according to its website, is an evangelical church that engages in niche practices such as the “laying on of hands.” Eden is a charismatic church whose members believes in spiritual healing, miracles, and deliverance, a practice that involves casting out “demons”—malign spirits they believe can occupy people who fail to repent their sins.
Past shelter residents said staff and some of the church volunteers frequently told women they were possessed by demons caused by past abortions, sex work itself, or other sins. Hamilton said the “demonology” freaked her out. “I’m a Christian—you know, I don’t mind doing little Bible studies with the girls,” she said. “But you’re telling these girls that if [they] had an abortion, they have a demonic spirit on them. You’re taking girls who’s been raped and brainwashed, and you’re telling them they have demons in them.”
Lisa said Sand and “two of the church women” repeatedly told her she would benefit from a deliverance. When she finally relented, she said, the pair coaxed her into an empty motel room and told her they thought she might be “possessed by some spirit or some demons” from which they could save her.
“I said, “Why would you think that?’ and they said, ‘You’re here, aren’t you?'” Lisa recalled. “‘You have to think about your life decisions. Even getting caught up with The More We Love means you weren’t making the best decisions.'” According to Lisa, the women circled up and laid their hands on her as they started to pray and speak in tongues. “And then they were like, ‘Demon, do you hear us? Speak your name. In the name of Jesus Christ, leave this woman.'”
Initially, Lisa thought “they were kidding—but no, they were totally serious. And then I got scared and started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what if I do have a demon inside of me? Maybe I do need this.” She even came up with a name for the made-up demon—Sydney.
Lisa had arrived at the shelter dependent on Xanax, and had experienced “back to back” seizures as she withdrew from the drug. She hadn’t had a seizure in several days, she said, but she let the women know that she could feel one coming on. Once she did, Lisa said, they left her alone. Not long afterward, she sent one of the staffers a “Merry Christmas” text. The staffer responded, she said, with a Youtube video about “prayers for demonic relief.”
Looking back, Lisa said she could tell the motel was “a really bad setup, but I was so desperate when I moved there. I was blindsided and I was so happy to have a roof over my head.”
“Ready to partner with you”
In her email, Moreland disputed many of the details we heard from people formerly associated with the Renton shelter. She said The More We Love’s programming “includes daily access to wraparound services that support stabilization and long-term recovery,” and that The More We Love works closely with “medical and behavioral health providers, including support with attending doctor’s appointments, medication management, and connections to behavioral health and substance use disorder services.”
Additionally, she said, the program offers “life skills development, safety planning, housing navigation, and support in reconnecting with employment, education, and long-term stability.” But the evidence for these claims consists mostly of Moreland’s own statements and those of the shelter clients she brings with her to testify in front of elected officials in an effort to secure more funding—compelling individual stories that don’t include the kind of data other nonprofits provide about their program outcomes.
As for the women who say they left the program or were kicked out without receiving most, if any, of those services, Moreland said, “when a woman shares that something in her experience did not feel supportive or did not meet her needs, we take that seriously. We seek to understand why and use that feedback to continue strengthening and evolving our program. This work requires constant learning, adjustment, and care, and that is something we remain committed to.”
The More We Love’s contract with Burien ended around the same time Seattle’s contract began. But Moreland is still a presence in Burien City Council chambers: last month, the council invited Moreland to accept a proclamation recognizing April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month proclamation. More recently, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority directed King County funds to the organization; according to KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge, The More We Love was the only provider that met all the guidelines for the money.
And Moreland is still pitching her services to local leaders. Last month, Moreland testified at a King County Council meeting, telling the councilmembers that The More We Love offers “a continuum of care” through its “crisis recovery and healing center in Renton. … We are part of the solution, and we are ready to partner with you today and scale. Our center in Renton is ready to expand the doors, deepen our partnerships and serve more families.”
In Seattle, where The More We Love first began serving sex trafficking survivors thanks to former councilmember Moore’s unorthodox directive, the group is still on the city’s radar for funding; during a committee meeting in September, City Councilmembers Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera both criticized HSD for—as Kettle put it—”zeroing out” the shelter contract at the end of last year, Debora Juarez brought the group up more recently as an example of an effective program for sex trafficking survivors on Aurora.
“The More We Love … [is] great work,” Rivera said last year. “They’re not the only folks doing the work, but they are one of the folks, and therefore they should be able to continue to do this work.” Councilmember Rob Saka has also praised the group.
But some of the human service providers who gave The More We Love credit for their ability to respond and get people into shelter at any time of the day or night may not prove lasting allies. Both providers who praised The More We Love for responding quickly to crisis calls said they weren’t sure what happened to the people they refer to Moreland’s program after they entered. One of them later followed up with PubliCola to say the person they thought was a success story had actually been kicked out of the program for relapsing, although The More We Love did help her transfer to a different program that had capacity to take on someone struggling with addiction.
After walking off the job in December and getting fired soon after, Hamilton is finally moving on. She now has job with a traditional nonprofit that provides housing and services to people leaving homelessness. She hasn’t spoken to Moreland since.
