Home is a deeply complex word, a sometimes triggering word, a word of comfort, or a word of pain. For many of our unhoused neighbors, the home where they were raised was where they learned to distrust the world. Home was never associated with warmth, or welcome, or love.
For over 10 years Aurora Commons, our neighborhood living room on Aurora, has been helping redefine what home means for thousands of people. Our doors have been open to our neighbors with the invitation to live life together, regardless of where you spent the night. We’ve shared countless cups of coffee and meals. We’ve celebrated together, birthdays, baby showers, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’ve grieved together, the pain of trauma, the separation or loss of family and friends. In the highs and lows, and everything in between, we have seen and known one another; and this seeing and knowing has taught us how to love each other.
We choose not to call our unhoused neighbors “homeless”, not because we think that term is derogatory. In fact most often our unsheltered community members self-identify as homeless. Rather, too often housed neighbors put homelessness in a box and then put all of the things they think homelessness is or means in that box. “Homelessness looks like ___, homelessness brings with it ____, homelessness is ____.” By labeling our neighbors “homeless”, we do not allow for the person we are encountering to be a complete person with highs and lows, with creativity and inspiration, with brilliance and compassion, life experience, story, a future. When we talk about our neighbors as living unsheltered, it allows for us to expand our imagination of what homelessness is; it is an experience, not an identity.
Our community of housed and unhoused neighbors has continued to grow and expand within the walls of our neighborhood living room, a physical space owned by a landlord who was running a business. A landlord that every few years needed to evaluate if our presence in their building was contributing positively to their bottom line. We have had to creatively negotiate to keep our home. We were, every few years, at risk of becoming home-less ourselves. Not knowing if we get to stay was deeply unsettling to our community, especially for our unhoused neighbors.
Friends, I’m so pleased to share with you that Aurora Commons has secured our permanent home. With funding from our State Legislature, the taxpayers of Washington State, our dear friends at Bethany Community Church, and the Heartsprung Fund we raised enough money to purchase our property free and clear; we get to STAY and do not have to pay rent or a mortgage! The purchase includes not only the walls our community has filled these past 11 years but also the building to the corner of 90th as well as the parking lot off of 90th & Nesbit. We can finally put our fears of being uprooted to rest. We can dig our roots in deeper, cultivating a sense of belonging and fostering connection, in a space that feels like home.
