Where the path home begins
Project Homeward exists to make one thing available in Whatcom County that is persistently unavailable: a decent, sober, well-run room that a person leaving prison can actually be released to.
That is a narrow mission on purpose. There are organisations in this county doing treatment, employment, and case management better than we ever would. Very few are buying and running the buildings. We decided to be useful at the part that was missing.
A company, not a charity — and we will not ask you for a donation
Project Homeward Incorporated is a Washington corporation, UBI 606 230 130. We are for-profit, which surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly why.
Housing that depends on an annual fundraising cycle is housing that can close when the cycle turns. Rent, paid by working residents and by housing assistance programmes, is a more durable foundation than goodwill — and Washington explicitly allows private operators to provide this housing. If the economics of one house work honestly, the model can be repeated. If they only work with a subsidy that has to be re-won every year, it cannot.
The trade-off is that we have to be disciplined rather than sympathetic. We think that is the right pressure to be under.
Commitments we would rather be held to than praised for
- Small, and staying small
- One house at a time, at the scale of the street it sits on. Growth means another house in another neighborhood, not a bigger building in this one.
- Answerable to the block
- A named contact with a real phone number, a response commitment in writing, and a standing offer to show any neighbor through the house.
- Honest about what we are
- We say who lives here and under what conditions. We do not describe the programme in language designed to obscure it.
- Cited, not asserted
- Every statistic we publish carries its source and the date we checked it. Where we have no evidence yet, we say that instead of borrowing someone else’s.
- Residents are adults
- People here are tenants with rights, not beneficiaries of our kindness. We do not tell rescue stories about the people who live in our buildings.
- Privacy by default
- No resident is named, photographed, or written about without specific written consent they can withdraw. Outcomes are published in aggregate only.
Whatcom County, and nowhere else for now
We are based in Bellingham and we operate here. Referrals come from local corrections staff, partnerships are with local providers, and the people we house are overwhelmingly people whose last stable address was in this county.
This is also less novel than it sounds. Whatcom County has had a state reentry facility operating on North Garden Street since 1976, and there are local organisations that have been doing reentry work here for years. We are adding a house to an established local effort, not introducing something the county has never seen.
The people accountable for this
Neighbors and partners are entitled to know who is behind a house on their street, and funders are entitled to know whose judgement they are relying on.
TODO(content): add leadership names, roles, and short bios, plus the Calyx Foundation relationship and its role in the pilot. These are facts about real people and a real organisation — supply them, do not draft them from inference. Remove any portrait slot that is not going to be filled.
Come and ask us something
If you live near a house we are looking at, or you work in reentry in this county, we would rather hear from you early than explain ourselves late.
Get in touch