Mission Moment: Building Almquist Place Transcript

 

Transcript:

Beruke: Homelessness is one of the biggest societal problems at this time, and we are doing things to contribute to end homelessness. So for me, to be a part of that is very important.

Bo: I was the project manager for this building, Bob and Marcia Almquist Place. I led it through from acquiring the site, designing it, financing, and construction. The building opened at the very end of March 2020. Bob and Marcia Almquist Place is named for Bob and Marcia Almquist. They were actually part of the group that founded Plymouth in 1980. This building is 105 studio apartments, 102 of those are for folks who have been living outside for a long time. And the building also has multiple community spaces, as well as offices for our Housing Case Managers, the nurse who is working on site, as well as it houses our maintenance department for all of Plymouth. We also worked to create the great plaza out front that has seating and a really fun interactive art piece that the community was part of working on as well. As we’re starting to figure out how to design a new building, Plymouth works really closely with our Property Management and Social Services departments to make sure that we’re improving on past buildings and incorporating the needs of tenants, so they’ll have input on things like how big of a community room we need, how many offices we need for staff at that building, and any new needs that have come up within units for tenants such as accessibility needs. Accessibility is really important to Plymouth. We know that folks with physical disabilities, mental disabilities are going to be living at this building and so we want to make sure that they’re going to have as easy of a time getting through the building, using their apartments. This building is located in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Seattle, which is a historically Vietnamese community and this is Plymouth’s first building in this neighborhood so we worked with the community early on in the process. It’s really important to Plymouth to do genuine community outreach, since we’re not only building in the neighborhood, but we’re going to be neighbors in this community for a very long time. We worked with the Friends of Little Saigon, which is the neighborhood organization in this area along with the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington, as well as Asian Counseling and Referral Services, who are helping with getting some folks into the building.

Kelly: ACRS is a social justice agency that promotes the empowerment of our clients. With the current pandemic, with COVID, we’ve noticed there’s an increase in needs. And we strongly feel that in order for clients to be able to live close to medical, social services, their support group it will benefit them greatly. We don’t want to place our clients into housing and live in isolation and have them feel, because we notice that will impact both their mental health and their physical health. So we are very excited about this partnership.

Beruke: Our partnership with ACRS will allow us to have more tenants from the International District, so as we bring in a more diverse tenant group in our population, we are going to learn a lot from ACRS who has been providing services in the International District for more than 40 years. So, they will lead us to provide culturally appropriate services to our diverse population.

Kelly: Many of our clients have language barriers. And with our 40+ language capacity, we’re able to help the clients navigate and communicate to access resources and create social networking. With this, we hope to have clients live the quality of life they deserve.

Bo: Bob and Marcia Almquist Place was funded through a whole variety of sources that are local, statewide, as well as federal level, so it takes a lot of funding from a lot of sources coming together to build a building like this. Almquist Place is the first building to open using funds from Plymouth’s PROOF campaign that started in 2019. And we now have another building under construction, and four more in our development pipeline using the funds from the campaign. There are lots of other community partners that are also involved in the process of opening a new building. So we had a lot of support in creating our Welcome Baskets, for tenants on move-in with just general supplies for starting living in a new building, as well as Welcome Home Food Bags with some food for folks who are moving in.

Beruke: Tenants’ reaction, their excitement, it is a life changing experience for them to have.