By Erica C. Barnett
Youthcare, Seattle’s largest housing and shelter provider for youth and young people experiencing homelessness, has shut down programs, laid off at least a quarter of its staff, and redirected resources from housing and shelter to address a budget crisis that has been building for many months. In recent weeks, the agency has announced plans to shutter a shelter for homeless refugee children, shut down a free GED program, and scale back services at a transitional housing program for LGBTQ+ youth.
On Thursday, YouthCare’s board chair, Becka Johnson-Poppe, announced the resignation of YouthCare’s embattled leader, Degale Cooper.
“We recognize that this is a time of uncertainty, and we want to acknowledge the concerns many of you have raised–particularly around our financial picture,” the email to staff said. “The Board is fully engaged and committed to securing YouthCare’s financial health and long-term sustainability. We are actively developing a plan to stabilize our operations and align our programs with the evolving needs of youth in our region.”
For months, current and former Youthcare staff have been raising concerns about how Cooper has managed Youthcare’s finances, programming, and staff.
They say the organization, founded more than 50 years ago with a mission to end youth homelessness, has largely abandoned that mission to focus single-mindedly on a workforce training and education hub on Capitol Hill called the Constellation Center, which is supposed to open in 2027 along with a planned new Community Roots Housing affordable housing project that will include 15 beds for formerly homeless youth.
Staff began publicly calling for Cooper’s resignation last month. In early June, about three-quarters of of Youthcare’s remaining staff signed a petition calling for Cooper’s ouster. The petition also demanded that Youthcare “provide accurate and transparent information about the agency’s financial solvency, with a coherent explanation of how we’ve come to our current state.”
“Having recently undergone layoffs to establish long-term financial stability, we yet again find ourselves in financial crisis,” the petition read.
Former staffers said YouthCare has been plagued with financial issues for years. In December 2023, an audit found “significant deficiencies” in Youthcare’s internal financial controls, meaning that their internal financial checks and balances do “not allow management or employees, in the normal course of performing their assigned functions, to prevent, or detect and correct, [financial] misstatements on a timely basis.”
The issues with financial compliance have been compounded, according to former finance staffers, by the fact that the agency has struggled to retain high-level finance staff, including a chief financial officer, for more than a few months at a time, and fired at least one staffer who raised whistleblower concerns about Youthcare’s financial practices.
In recent months, dozens of staffers have received layoff notices, and several executive-level staff have quit or been fired, leaving only Cooper and Chief People and Culture Officer William Wiggins at the top of the agency’s org chart.
The cuts to services and housing come one year after Youthcare announced it was closing down two transitional housing programs for youth along with its youth shelters in the University District and South Seattle. Then, as now, YouthCare said it was “consolidating services” to secure the nonprofit’s financial future.
YouthCare’s cost-saving measures have impacted workers’ ability to do their jobs, former staffers say.
Earlier this year, for example, employees’ cell phones were cut off, reportedly because Youthcare hadn’t paid their cell phone provider. Then, on a Friday afternoon a couple of months ago, YouthCare abruptly shut off the credit cards frontline staffers used to pay for their clients’ basic needs, leaving them unable to pay expenses that typically amounted to somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 a month.
“They just got cut off with no explanation, and the staff were left to tell the people they worked with, ‘Sorry, I just can’t get that for you,” Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) 8 representative Phoebe Feldsher said. “It created a lot of hardship for the clients and staff.”
Other staffers say Youthcare fell behind on the rent payments that keep many clients in affordable housing, holding on to rent checks instead of paying them promptly. “People are going to get evicted,” Feldsher said.
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PubliCola sent a list of questions to Cooper on Monday morning. She referred us to a consultant at the Fearey Group, a crisis communications and public relations firm, which provided responses from the board on Thursday afternoon.
In an email, the board said they were aware of the disruption to staffers’ cell phone services but did not know whether it was intentional or due to nonpayment. They attributed the credit card freeze to concern over how much staffers were charging on their cards and whether they were accounting for it appropriately.
“At this point we are not aware, or have received any evidence, that clients have gone without payment for rent and other essential needs. We do believe the restrictions in the use of credit cards probably affected how client assistance was provided,” the board wrote.
After the union representing Youthcare staff, OPEIU 8, published the petition calling for Cooper’s resignation in June, Youthcare set up a virtual town hall to discuss employee concerns. But when staffers displayed Zoom backgrounds that read “Save Youthcare, Fire Degale,” Youthcare management ended the meeting early, reportedly after muting some staffers who were trying to speak out about their concerns; a second town hall was scheduled, then canceled, and former staffers say they were left in the dark.
“The decision was made in May or June to start consolidating our sites because we were not utilizing our financial planning in a way that would have sustained any of our operations for quite some time,” one former staffer said. “When I was there, it was always, ‘How are we going to get another $20,000 in here to meet payroll?'”
Shortly after the petition went online, non-unionized staffers, including program managers, signed an open letter addressed to YouthCare’s board, expressing dismay about the program closures and a lack of confidence in Cooper, who replaced Melinda Giovengo as CEO in 2022.
“Instead of taking responsibility, Degale Cooper and others have placed the blame on front-line staff for procedural errors, such as coding receipts, despite the fact that we have been operating without current or accurate financial information for months,” the staffers wrote. “This is not leadership. This is mismanagement. And it is our staff and clients who are paying the price.”
In a June 15 email to staff, Cooper said the open letter did not represent the views of YouthCare “leadership” and contained “multiple inaccuracies, distorted facts, and harmful speculation, and it was not shared in the spirit of care, collaboration, or truth.” Cooper then promised to answer any questions staff might have about “what is changing, why, and what it means” at the upcoming virtual town hall.
“We recognize that moments of change are hard. They raise real questions and emotions,” Cooper wrote. “As the CEO, I want to make sure your questions are answered by those accountable for this organization, not by anonymous sources or rumors.”
Multiple people who attended that town hall said the meeting left them with more questions than answers about how Youthcare planned to address its financial crisis. Among other questions, they wanted to know why Youthcare was shutting down programs, whether the agency planned to cut more of their jobs, and whether Youthcare had a plan for the future.
“They kept muting participants,” one former staffer said. “And [staffers] were like, ‘hey, if you’re going to call a town hall and then mute us, it doesn’t serve any purpose.'”
The programs that are slated for closure, reductions, or consolidation into other YouthCare programs include:
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