Volunteers, donations and lots of prayers.
That’s how Gather Church Pastor Patty Howard described the essentials that built Shalom Village in Centralia.
By the count of Harrison Square Presbyterian Church Pastor and Hope Housing Collaborative of Lewis County President Mark McHugh, the new transitional housing facility is the product of contributions and support from more than 1,000 individuals.
“There are quite literally 1,000,” McHugh said Friday, “over 1,000 people who have participated in this project, and I say that because this isn't one person's project. This isn't one church's project. This isn't even one nonprofit’s project. Shalom Village is first and foremost God's project.”
Hope Housing Collaborative held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the long awaited 12-unit tiny home village in Centralia lovingly dubbed Shalom Village Friday afternoon.
An estimated 200 supporters arrived at the property to celebrate and tour the project. While Friday marked the end of one stage of Shalom Village — its foundation — it also marks the beginning of its operations.
As a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Friday event was, first and foremost, a launching point for the facility that has been in the works for years. As they spoke, both Howard and McHugh proudly announced that the housing collaborative had begun interviewing candidates to be housed at the village just a day earlier.
The pair informed the crowd that the collaborative had already received roughly 20 applications.
Those interviews will continue over the coming weeks under a four-person panel consisting of at least one Hope Housing Collaborative board member, Howard, who will oversee the site, the site manager, Cory Price, and a case manager.
Shalom Village is what some would call a high-barrier transitional housing site, meaning there are relatively strict rules around who is permitted to be housed in the facility. For starters, applications to live in Shalom Village are not something that just anyone can find at the post office or food bank.
Applications have been given to local organizations that offer case management, including those such as The Salvation Army and Destination Hope and Recovery. All applications must come with a recommendation from a case manager who is currently working with the applicant. Those that do receive housing earn a spot in the village free of charge.
Case management will also be part of living in the facility, with case managers on site five days a week, Monday through Friday, and residents coming in with an expectation of meeting with a case manager once a week. Staff case managers will come from Gather Church, which already has experience providing those services in the area.
“They do this every day with folks they work with, and so because they are well practiced at it, they know where to find housing opportunities in a market where there don't seem to be housing opportunities,” Howard said.
Howard and McHugh see a successful stay as lasting between four and eight months with a maximum of one year. Some exceptions may be made if a resident is making progress.
The facility also comes with other requirements such as a background check and sobriety.
As McHugh described it, the sobriety requirement is intended to protect those residing in the village. Both Howard and McHugh recognized that residents recovering from addiction may relapse. They said those events will be managed on a case-by-case basis based on the judgement of the site manager and case managers.
Howard pointed out that Gather Church, itself a member of the Hope Housing Collaborative, has a treatment program and there are others in the area.
“There are places around here for people to, you know, get treatment and, going into treatment for seven days, 10 days, 15 days, 30 days, whatever, is beautiful, wonderful,” Howard said. “We’re not going to close you out if you relapse, you know, if you’re making progress.”
When it comes to interviews, Howard and McHugh said the biggest thing they are looking for is to make sure that applicants will work well in a community. There is no work requirement for living in the village, but residents will be expected to keep up with chores, and the housing collaborative hopes those residents will also work to become part of the small community that is Shalom Village.
The Friday event also served as a celebration of what has been accomplished so far. It provided a moment to recognize the effort necessary to create the site. Project Manager, Hope Housing Collaborative Board Member and member of Chehalis United Methodist Church Beth Wilson attempted to thank a long list of volunteers and contributors, which included Dan Duffy, the Centralia High School construction class, Brian Dow, Terry Knudsen and many more.
Wilson is also one of those vital volunteers, initially volunteering to be a board member of the housing collaborative and later taking on the responsibility of managing the project itself.
“From the moment I heard Patty Howard speak about Hope Housing to my church council at Chehalis United Methodist Church, I knew I wanted to be involved,” Wilson said.
Recognizing volunteers also meant remembering two who have died. Two members of the Hope Housing board — Gather Church Pastor Cole Meckle and distinguished local educator Kay Odegaard — died before the site’s completion but were remembered lovingly during Friday’s event.
“A major hardship we faced over the last couple years was losing two of our board members, people who have become dear friends to us,” McHugh said.
McHugh provided a brief history of the origins of Shalom Village for the audience and later expanded on that journey in an interview with The Chronicle.
As he said at the event, the village found its beginning in a book study among members of both Harrison Square Presbyterian Church and Immanuel Lutheran Church, which started at least four years ago. The group was, at the time, dedicated specifically to books concerning unhoused people in the United States.
During that year of study, members of the two congregations, and possibly others, found themselves inspired to do something to help those who were unhoused. Looking to help, but unsure of how to do so, they invited Meckle to speak with them.
“Cole’s answer was, ‘You should give houses where people are living,’” McHugh told the audience Friday. “‘You should give people a safe place to sleep, a place where they can lock up their possessions at night, have a bathroom that they don’t have to walk a mile and a half to in the middle of the night.”
That conversation kicked off the effort to develop a tiny home village inspired both by Meckle’s experience and also by an ongoing regional effort by Presbyterian churches in the area. The existing Hope Village at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Olympia served as a nearby model and example for the new site in Centralia.
At that time, a larger group of congregations gathered together in support of the idea of improving the transitional housing in the area. Roughly three years ago, that effort bore fruit as four congregations — Chehalis United Methodist, Gather Church, Harrison Square Presbyterian Church and Westminster Presbyterian Church in Chehalis — agreed to establish the 501(c)3 nonprofit, today known as the Hope Housing Collaborative of Lewis County. Immanuel Lutheran Church serves as an affiliate partner of the collaborative.
Around the same time, McHugh recalls his own church contemplating the empty lot it owned at the end of the driveway. The church started a year-long period, a “year of discernment” that included listening sessions, worship sessions, prayer and conversations around leasing the plot out for the tiny home village.
At the end of the year, the church, in an official vote of the congregation, elected to lease the land, which today is leased for $1 a year to the collaborative for the operation of Shalom Village. According to McHugh, nearly the entire congregation voted in favor of that agreement.
“There were a lot of questions, but people ultimately said this is something we believe in,” McHugh said.
From there, it became a matter of fundraising and, eventually, design and construction. A donation from a closing local nonprofit, which the collaborative preferred to leave anonymous, provided the initial seed money.
Fundraising remains vitally important for the site's operation. The facility has, afterall, been entirely privately funded through donations or grants from private organizations and individuals. No public money or grant funds from any level of government was used to build the facility.
According to McHugh, the project cost just under $600,000 to construct and is expected to cost roughly $80,000 a year to operate moving forward.
“Which seems like a tremendous amount of money,” McHugh said. “Is a tremendous amount of money, but without volunteers and donations and community members, the cost of it would have been in the millions.”
The collaborative hopes to house between 12 and 20 people a year for that cost, assuming there will be some turnover and graduation out of the facility each year. The leaders of the collaborative also hope that this may be just the beginning of their contributions to transitional housing in the area.
McHugh and Howard said the first goal of the collaborative and of Shalom village is an obvious one. The collaborative hopes to house individuals. It wishes to give them a bed to sleep in. But beyond the immediate impact, McHugh hopes the village proves an inspiration for other communities that want to help house the homeless, and maybe even as a first installment of the contributions the collaborative can make.
On a more personal note, both Howard and McHugh also hope the effort transforms not only those who benefit directly from the program, but also the members of their congregation.
“This is the way that people are transformed,” Howard said. “By meeting people face to face that they wouldn't normally meet, and caring for one another, and I'm excited to see these churches transform to be more like Jesus in their own communities, and to see outside of the walls of their own churches.”
For more information on the tiny home village, visit https://www.hopehousinglc.com/shalom-village.
