By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore directed the city’s Human Services Department to award $1 million in funding for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through a direct contract with The More We Love, a group that began as a company offering private encampment sweeps and now holds most of the city of Burien’s homelessness contracts.

Moore’s move, which the city’s Human Services Department immediately agreed to implement, effectively ended a competitive bidding process that had been underway since last year, when providers who work with sexually exploited adults and minors in Seattle began meeting to discuss what a fair and equitable competitive distribution of new local funding could look like. The groups first met with Moore’s office last September, and came away believing that the funds would be distributed to various groups through a fair, competitive bidding process, according to several people involved in those discussions. HSD later created a timeline for this process and distributed it to the potential bidders.

City staff reiterated their commitment to a fair, open process in meetings that included organizations that work with survivors as well as law enforcement, Harborview, and other “system partners” that could potentially refer people to the new services the $2 million was going to fund.

“From the very beginning, when we heard there might be an opportunity for additional funding and resources to support the community of survivors that work against trafficking, we were thrilled—and the next thing out of our mouth was, ‘Providers deserve an open and fair process,'” said Amaranthia Torres, co-executive director for the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence.

Unless Moore rescinds her directive—or HSD decides not to fulfill her request—the funding decision will be final. The mayor’s office, which oversees HSD and was included in email conversations about Moore’s directive to forego the usual bidding process, directed all of our questions to HSD. After this story posted, HSD responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement: “No contract or award has yet been processed for [Moore’s budget action[. HSD is continuing conversations around next steps for implementing these investments.”

“It was shocking that all of the work to engage with the community this whole time is being thwarted,” Torres said. “It seemed obvious to me that the way city funds get allocated shouldn’t feel like its rigged. Everyone should have a fair shake.”

The $1 million, which is supposed to add 10 beds to The More We Love’s shelter for sexually exploited women in Renton, was part of $2 million Moore set aside to help survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the city budget last year to help providers respond to a new law reinstating Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Currently, the only overnight space specifically for people escaping the sex trade in Seattle is a six-bed temporary housing facility run by Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST).

Representatives from existing Black-led groups that work with survivors said that by giving $1 million to a white-led group that has not previously held a contract to work with CSE survivors, the city is ignoring and undermining the expertise of organizations that focus on Black and brown survivors, who make up a disproportionate number of people in the commercial sex trade. In recent years, organizations that help survivors have made concerted efforts to end what several described as a “white savior” mentality, in which white leaders (often women) believe they know what’s best for Black and brown survivors.

The news was “a slap in the face,” a leader from one Seattle organization, who requested anonymity because her group works with the city, said. “It’s more than a funding issue—it’s about power and whose voices get amplified.”

Another longtime organizational leader said she was disappointed, but not surprised, that Moore was directing the funds to The More We Love.  “It’s not to say their organization couldn’t have been funded, but you should not be giving this organization all the funding,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘We’re going to fund this white-led group and let them run this pilot without any of you,’ but they need all of our support.”

It’s highly unusual for an individual council member to ask an executive department to spend a large amount of money on a single organization through a direct contract without holding a vote to release the funds. It’s perhaps even more unusual for an executive department to take this kind of direction from a legislator.

And there’s another odd wrinkle in this case: Moore apparently asked HSD to give $500,000 of the $2 million to REST to expand its own receiving center in February, but rescinded that offer after HSD had already informed REST that they were getting the money, according to emails and sources familiar with the offer. REST participated in all the conversations leading up to the planned RFP and supported the process; the organization’s leaders were reportedly surprised to learn that the city had decided to bypass the RFP and award some of the money to them directly.

Earlier this year, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (MODVSA), which is part of HSD, launched a series of meetings to discuss the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for the funds, which was supposed to come out in May. Under an expedited schedule, the city was set to release the funds to the winning bidders in September.

“We’re going to focus on how to get that $2 million and get all of this work organized and coordinated in a very timely fashion,” HSD Director Tanya Kim told Moore’s housing and human services committee during a public meeting in January. “That $2 million requires us to expedite an RFP to get those services online as soon as possible.”

Elizabeth Dahl, executive director of Aurora Commons, said a competitive RFP “is the only way to ensure a fair and equitable process, with appropriate oversight, to ensure the funds allocated to respond to the SOAP legislation are used effectively. Organizations and leaders in the [gender-based violence] field, including ours, were leaned on for their expertise throughout the SOAP legislation process, and we were ensured there would be a fair process for distributing the funds awarded through an RFP. That is not what is happening.”

“Bypassing the RFP process is a blatant dismissal of the work we did and the expertise of those of us who have been doing this work for years,” the first CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said.

Neither Moore’s office nor HSD responded to questions by press time, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Emails between Moore and her staff and Kim, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and other city officials show that Moore directed HSD to give the funds to The More We Love about a week after visiting their shelter in Renton, where she spoke to women living there and found their stories “compelling.”

“Given the urgency of the need for additional receiving beds in a safe location … and The More We Love’s ability to immediately add an additional 10 beds with wrap-around support and 24/7 access, I am requesting $1 million of the $2 million [allocation] be awarded to The More We Love for the provision of 10 emergency receiving center beds at their facility as soon as a contract can be finalized,” Moore told Kim in a March 12 email.

“HSD will move forward with the below, piloting The More We Love’s emergency receiving center—ensuring there’s a clear nexus to Seattle given the location [in Renton]—at $1 million, and implementing the remaining as proposed by HSD,” Kim responded. Renton is about 20 miles away from Aurora Ave. North, where Seattle’s street sex trade is concentrated.

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In a subsequent email directing HSD staff to “move forward with implementation,” Kim said it was unclear how much will be left over from the original $2 million, which also has to pay for a new city staffer, consultants, and any costs associated with the work the city has already done on the planned competitive bidding process.

The More We Love recently opened a small shelter at a house in Renton, but otherwise does not have any track record working with CSE survivors; the group’s leader, Kristine Moreland, worked at REST for a couple of years but was never a direct service provider, according to several people familiar with her role there.

Moreland did not respond to a request for an interview.

In an email inviting Moore to visit The More We Love’s Renton shelter, Moreland said a staffer for the group had recently sat down with the group of women and learned about gaps in service they faced, finding the revelations “both eye-opening and heartbreaking because many of the challenges they described seem like they should be simple to fix, yet they persist.”

The language is similar to the pitch Moreland made to city officials in Burien, where she claimed that she, unlike existing groups with more experience working with chronically homeless people, could easily get people into housing and treatment; subsequently, the Burien council ended the city’s contract with the longstanding outreach group REACH and handed that money to The More We Love.

It’s unclear what services The More We Love provides at its Renton facility. According to Moore’s email to HSD Director Kim, Moreland told the city her organization offers  “substance use treatment, counseling, job training, advocacy in the criminal legal system as victims as well as defendants, and assistance accessing housing.”

But people that have been working in the field for years or decades are skeptical. Because the groups that assist CSE survivors have varying levels of funding and offer different services, they typically work together to provide wraparound support rather than trying to do everything themselves, several representatives from these organizations said. Moreland’s group has never been part of those conversations.

Moreland’s claims about The More We Love’s results have been hard to verify.

Earlier this year, Moreland presented The More We Love’s “year end report” to the Burien City Council. The five-page document says The More We Love “assisted” 303 people, including “25 survivors helped,” between August and December 2024, with a numberless pie chart providing a very high-level breakdown of the services the group claims to have provided. The More We Love provided the same five-page report to Seattle leaders, including Moore, as part of their pitch for funding.

The group has not published a more detailed breakdown of its services or data showing more detailed measures of effectiveness, such as how many people obtain and remain in permanent housing, how many people are able to stay sober or in recovery after treatment or detox, and how many people return to the sex trade after going through their program.

The More We Love has been criticized in the past for distributing private health information about their clients to police, elected officials and at least one private business owner in Burien, and one provider we spoke to expressed concern about the fact that the organization publishes the photos of sexual exploitation survivors on its Facebook page, potentially revealing information about their location and lives to their former traffickers.

Despite holding a major homelessness contract with Burien and securing a million-dollar promise from Seattle, The More We Love just organized as a nonprofit in mid-2023, and did not have enough revenue to file a full 990 tax form with the IRS that year. “They haven’t been on the scene long enough to have results,” the longtime provider said.

Many of the organizational leaders who spoke to PubliCola said they felt the city had not only wasted their time but violated their trust.

The longtime CSE leader called the outcome “really sad, because at the end of the day, the city is breaking the trust of the community. … The city talked about providing a forum to share critical information about investments, and now they’re going behind our backs.”

“We already know that white people are in power and that Black and brown people have to fight ten times as hard to get the same respect,” the other CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said. “It reinforces a harmful pattern where white-led groups secure resources and Black-led groups that have the solutions to these critical issues are sidelined.”