The King County Council approved a new agreement outlining the future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, shifting power at the agency from a diverse group of advocates, service providers, and people who have been homeless themselves to a governing board made up almost entirely of elected officials from around the county, each with their own political agenda.
The KCRHA is funded almost entirely by two entities: King County and the City of Seattle.
The governing board, as we’ve reported, will include three “lived experience” positions, but the criteria for filling these roles exclude anyone without high-level professional or academic experience, effectively ensuring that people with recent or current experience with homelessness will be ineligible to serve on the board.
Although elected officials involved in setting up the new structure, including members of the Seattle City Council and Mayor Bruce Harrell, have characterized the change as a simple streamlining of an unwieldy governing structure, advocates and current and former implementation board members protested that by removing people who have been homeless from positions of power, the KCRHA and its funders are straying from the agency’s founding principle: That people with lived experience should be “equal partners” in designing a homelessness system that meets their needs.
Under the new framework, the three “lived experience” members of the governing board will be chosen by the elected officials on the board, and will be required to have high-level experience at an agency or company the same size as KCRHA, such as experience as a CFO at a company with more than 100 staffers, or experience as an academic researcher studying homelessness.
Those criteria, KCRHA Continuum of Care board member Elizabeth Maupin told the county council, set a “very high bar. You are not going to get people who have recently been homeless, who really know what’s going on out there.” (The KCRHA’s Continuum of Care board is mandated by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development and currently includes a number of people with lived experience of homelessness.)
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Michelle Eastman, a spokesperson for the Lived Experience Coalition, said, “I do not believe that Seattle and King County can select members who truly represent the people most impacted, since government has been trying to solve the issue of homelessness for decades with little success. They still need strong, lived experience representation to counteract the effect of special interests.”
The LEC is an advocacy organization made up largely of people with direct experience being homeless; former KCRHA CEO Marc Dones empowered the LEC and delegated official agency work to the group, but subsequently disavowed the group amid heated conflicts over its role in a hotel-based shelter program and within the KCRHA itself.
King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski said he thought the KCRHA “got a little out of balance” by embracing “a well-intentioned effort to bring in the expertise and experience of folks with lived experience,” and was now committing to better accountability by putting more “elected folks who I think our public holds … responsible” for addressing homelessness “more quickly, more efficiently. And the structure that we set up five years ago or so now was impeding that work.”
Two days after the county council voted unanimously to approve the new agreement, members of the existing implementation board used one of the group’s final meetings to confront new KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison about the decision to diminish the role of homeless and formerly homeless people at the authority.
“The KCRHA was built around centering lived experience,” implementation board alternate member Marvin Futrell said. “Removing [people with lived experience] from the decision-making tables at any period of time is disempowering. … ‘Centering the voice of lived experience’ is more than just a slogan. It was supposed to be the way that we worked.”
Kinnison, who was appointed in May, said the agency “is going to continue to involve folks with lived experience in everything that we do,” noting that KCRHA is planning to hire a “lived experience coordinator… to do authentic work with folks with lived and living experience.”
