The Love in Action story shared by Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) Sunday was a powerful testament to how the most vulnerable among us are offered shelter and treated with dignity by this organization. One of my fellow Zoom participants captured what I, and likely others, were thinking by writing in the chat: “How do we help DESC?”
As a member of Plymouth’s Exploratory Development Committee, we have been asking these sorts of questions: How do we help people experiencing homelessness? How do we support the cadre of service workers who travel into Seattle for work? How do we provide a place of worship for our congregants? How do we offer a sacred space for other organizations, including the Native peoples originally on the land?
These are not easy questions to answer, and no one answer will satisfy everybody.
The high-flying kite of our aspirations is tethered by practical questions about budget and income. The equation cannot be balanced by focusing solely on mission--we also need to look at the numbers. The data below show monetary trends of four aspects of Plymouth’s annual budget from 2015 to 2020. The two lines that cross in the middle of the graph are importantly showing that contributions have decreased significantly while building expenses have increased over the last five years. If we added capital projects and expenditures that have been deferred, the Building Expenses line would be much steeper. We have been able to rely on our healthy endowment to attend to our building and mission, but this is likely not sustainable long-term.
We are looking into a future where the land itself can provide a sustainable income, allowing Plymouth to prioritize mission and programs. To this end, the committee will be working with Meriwether Partners to ask developers to provide more information about possible avenues for re-development, in the form of a Request for Information. This is not a plan for (re)development, but an information-gathering step. The option of “do nothing” is still on the table.
What keeps me up at night doing this work? It is not the idea of insignificance. It is the idea that we have the potential capacity to shape downtown Seattle in real and meaningful ways for generations to come. This is Big Work. To be honest, it is scary work. Considering Plymouth’s bumpy road around communal decision-making, it is work that requires prayers, feedback, perseverance, and the assumption of good intentions. As always, we welcome your feedback: Click Here.
This endeavor will take some Pentecostal fire and energy, as we seek to speak the language of God.
-Joan Griswold, Exploratory Development Committee
Click here to read revised Statement of Vision and Values.