Emma Hughes

Welcome to today's episode On The Corner of Homelessness and Global Migration. I know typically this podcast has focused on the local or national angle, but today we're widening the conversation and we're really excited. I'm Emma Hughes.

Joe Ader

And I'm Joe Ader.

Emma Hughes

And today, we're exploring homelessness and what global housing instability and migration look like. Before we jump in, I want to give our disclaimer that homelessness is a complex issue. We've been reminded of that throughout every conversation that we've had and this conversation it's no different. We don't claim to explore every single part of an intersection, but hope that this conversation brings new clarity to the reality as a whole. Please keep an open and curious mindset as you listen and seek to learn, just as we are.

With that said, today we are lucky to have special guest, Mark Finney. Mark is the executive director of Thrive International and since 2017, he has been leading efforts in Spokane to welcome refugees and other immigrants. He's traveled extensively, visiting more than 20 countries, including direct engagement with refugees in camps and urban areas on 4 continents. Welcome Mark, we're super excited to have you here.

Mark Finney

Thank you. It's a privilege to be here.

Joe Ader

Yeah. Welcome. So excited that you're here to to add this voice to the conversation.

Emma Hughes

One of the things we always kind of like to tee off our episodes with is having you tell us a little bit more about how you ended up where you are. And what experiences have informed your passion up to this point?

Mark Finney

Great question. So, I started in college and I was kind of one of those kids that never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. And so I never had a good answer when people asked me. So, I majored in communications in college figuring that that I could probably do a lot of things with that. I was also drawn towards ministry. So, after I finished my degree I started working part time and at church actually here in Spokane as a youth pastor and that really felt like a good fit, sort of that social services combined with, you know, spirituality and faith that that just really clicked for me. So I went to grad school down in California for a few years and thought that I would end up probably working full time in a church somewhere, and that just never worked out.

I got lots of part time and volunteer opportunities, but never landed full time in a church. In the meantime, I got an opportunity to travel with my wife overseas for a year, so we lived in Thailand and traveled throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of Asia. It just was a tremendously, paradigm expanding year for us doing. And then life took me other places. I ended up going and and getting a PhD in theology as part of an opportunity I had when other doors were closing during the 2009 and following recession. Then I moved back to Spokane this is where my family originally from had been gone for 10 years in 2015. Thinking again, like OK, this is my chance to get involved in ministry and and work at a church and the opportunity I moved here forward dissolved pretty quickly and I ended up getting an opportunity to work with refugees as a social worker.

I had a passion for multicultural work. I lived in LA for 10 years in a very multicultural neighborhood and overseas in Thailand. And so it was a good fit to work with refugees here because I got to use some of my multicultural skills and and found that really life giving and then from being the frontline sort of case manager with brand new refugees that I ended up leading the organization that I was serving with less than a year later and after five years leading there, it was the opportune time for me to start something new, to address gaps in the services that I saw in the resettlement structure for refugees, one of those being housing. So, when I founded thrive a couple of years ago, one of the cornerstone pieces that we wanted to do is to see if we could look at more creative and innovative strategies for creating housing specifically for newly arriving immigrants. So that's kind of how I ended up here. In addition to housing projects for refugees and other immigrants, we also specialize in programs for refugee women and for youth.

Emma Hughes

I can definitely tell we have another visionary at the table.

Joe Ader

Oh yes, we're we're excited for sure, for sure. For sure. No, Mark and I are good friends and have have talked a lot about this, but we also come from this connection to the faith background into this type of work. And so I think that connection is really helpful for us with that.

Emma Hughes

Before we continue our conversation too far, I want to get on the same page about some of the key terms that I think are going to be used throughout this episode. So what is a refugee versus an immigrant versus an asylum seeker? And then can you just briefly like the the 30 secondview of what is the resettlement process?

Mark Finney

So immigrants are really any category of people who crosses a border beyond a short term experience. So if I, you know, go to Mexico for two weeks, I'm not an immigrant, I'm a tourist. But if I move my family to Mexico for a job, I become an immigrant. So anybody who transitions across a border is an immigrant of one kind or another if it's a long term arrangement. A refugee is a subset of immigrants who are specifically crossing a border for humanitarian reasons, and there's a technical definition that the UN uses in order to categorize folks for that so that they can determine who is eligible for various services and programs. And really, it's all around the word persecution.

So you're a refugee if you fled the country that you came from because of persecution, often that's wars like what we've seen with over 6 million people who fled the country of Ukraine in the last two years because of war. Those are refugees, but it can be other things too. We serve folks in our community who, for example, are persecuted because of their faith in one country where their faith is a minority group, they're not safe there. They have to leave their country because of that, or there's other categories as well. We do see some folks, for example, who in certain countries it's they're you're heavily persecuted for being part of the LGBTQ community. And we've had folks that have arrived here that we've served in that category.

It can be other categories as well. Sometimes it's political affiliation, but refugees really are humanitarian folks who can't stay in their country because of persecution or violence. And right now the world is at an all time high since numbers of refugees have been recorded starting at the end of World War 2. Right now in 2024, we actually have the highest number of refugees globally, which is over 30 million people. Now again, that doesn't count folks who've left one part of their country to go to another. You know, if you've, if we were affected by a war in Sudan, for example, and you move to a different part of Sudan, you're called internally displaced people. So you're still homeless and there's like, 70 million of those people. But in addition, there's 30 million who've had to actually leave their own countries for these reasons. So there's a huge number of folks that are experiencing this.

The refugee resettlement process is a program created by the US government in about 1979 that allows a limited number of people to move to the US from areas of the world that have lots of refugees. So right now we would be thinking of places like Afghanistan, Syria, obviously Ukraine. In certain parts of Southeast Asia and other parts of Africa, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So every year since about 1980, the United States has welcomed usually around 100,000 refugees from these various camps around the world, specifically people who have been long term refugees who don't just leave their country for a year or two, but I have good reasons of thinking that they will never be able to go back, and who in many cases are not allowed to stay in that second country where they fled to. So we have a lot of refugees that come from Africa via Uganda, for example. You know they leave South Sudan or the Congo. They moved to Uganda, but the Government of Uganda doesn't have the jobs or the resources to let them just become Ugandan citizens. So they stay kind of quarantined in these camps for years and sometimes, in some cases, decade. And it's situations like that where the US has a limited number of slots where they say, OK, we'll allow people to apply, go through security, background checks and a process of eventually coming to the United States.

So the process involves that pre screening and application process, which usually takes at least two years on the front end, then they take out a loan to buy plane tickets to come here. And when they get here they have the support of a refugee resettlement agency at contracted nonprofit with the government that helps them for about 90 days. So it's amazing to me that as many folks can be on their own 2 feet in 90 days as there are, but that's the background that I worked in for about 6 years before starting Thrive.

Emma Hughes

Wow. And is the term refugee and asylum seeker interchangeable, or are those also different?

Mark Finney

Sometimes they're used interchangeably because the reasons people seek asylum are the same reasons that people flee their countries as refugees. The difference, that's very very technical difference here. Anybody who you meet in the United States who uses the designation refugee as somebody who applied overseas and then waited for that vetting process to happen before they got a visa to come here. So when the time they get here, they're they have, you know, a legal status to be in the country and they have permission to work right away upon arrival. Asylum seekers are folks who often are motivated by the same situations but don't or didn't wait for years and years in a refugee camp before they came here. They simply showed up at one of our borders, often the southern borders where we're hearing most about this. But asylum seekers come through other ports of entry as well. And those folks are entitled to the same privileges. International law says you can't send somebody back to a country where their life is in danger.

This basically happened because the US sent boatloads of Jews back to Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and so law has changed in order to try and prevent us from doing something like that again, or other countries. And so at the southern border, we have a lot of folks who are requesting asylum when they come to the border, and that's basically they're entitled to the same protections, but they haven't gone through the application process. And so the Border Patrol who usually interacts with these folks when they approach the border gives them the documentation documenting they're in the country and then gives them a court date when they can go before a judge to present their case to see if they qualify to stay here permanently. Unfortunately, our courts are so backlogged and our systems are so overwhelmed that many folks wait years before their court date. Which creates this very unusual category of asylum seekers, folks who are claiming to want to be here but who are not yet approved long term to stay, and that creates all sorts of interesting intersectionality with homelessness.

Joe Ader

Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. So this, you know, we're on the corner of homelessness and here. And so tell us about how these two inner interconnect the homelessness and refugees and immigration.

Mark Finney

Right. So to start first with refugees, because that's the piece that as a country we have more experience with and from, you know various communities, whether it's here in Spokane or most other you know 1st and 2nd tier cities around the country have a long term presence of receiving refugees, at least decades old. And so in many of these communities there's an established infrastructure that meets folks literally from the time they arrive at the airport, helps them find their first housing, gets them employed, helps kids go enrolled in schools, teach, you know, connects people the English classes and sort of gives them the basic supports they need to move, move effectively into the community and become part of a community.

Very occasionally, some of those folks become homeless because of the additional challenges that they have. But my experience is that it it's it's surprisingly unusual for newly arrived refugees to become homeless, in part because they've already gone through some social services support, and they have some connections they can fall back on. If they have traumatic or difficult experiences in the community, they can go back to that resettlement agency. And even if that agency doesn't have, you know, housing available that they own, usually they can refer to other agencies and kind of help people not end up in long term homelessness.

For the asylum seekers, it's a different situation because when they enter the country, they're not immediately supported by social service agencies, at least not on a systemic style. The government doesn't refer them to social services quite the way that happens with refugees. And there's just so many of them right now. I mean, we're talking like hundreds of thousands every month at this point because we were just this huge influx right now. So that overtaxes resources in all kinds of communities. Initially, we've seen over the past several years that you know, bordering communities on the southern border, we're just inundated with newly arriving folks. I mean, I, a few years ago was in El Paso, TX and talking to some folks who are working with migrants there. And they said that every year, the entire population of El Paso comes through as immigrants. And you know, what do you do when it's not just there's a lot of people here, but it's like our population just doubled because of so many folks that need help?

So now that's now that's become something that's being pushed into other communities as Texas and other states are sort of busing or flying people to places like New York and Chicago and Denver. Again, they have the challenges of not maybe always speaking English and of being new to the community, but the biggest challenge is that our government has set a system up where newly arrived asylum seekers do not have the authorization to work. So they're not allowed to get jobs, even though there are jobs in these communities that would gladly hire them. They're banned from doing that, frankly, as a disincentive to migrating. It's a way to try and keep people out. It's a sort of a threat if you cross this border, you will be homeless for six months. Are you sure you still want to do it? And there's enough folks saying, you know, we don't have other options or places to go back to and we're willing to take that risk and figure that out, that we are seeing hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless, migrants living in our communities.

Emma Hughes

In our very, very first episode, we followed kind of the history of homelessness in the United States. And one of the points, Joe, that you had brought up at that point was anytime you see migration, you will see homelessness.

Joe Ader

Absolutely.

Emma Hughes

Talk a little about that.

Joe Ader

Yes, I mean, going back throughout history, the the history of homelessness is a history of migration, really, and especially in the United States, we go back, I mean, how the country was founded was migrants, you know, I mean, they got here and didn't have anything, had to create from the ground up and then we go into, you know, the Revolutionary War lot of migration because of war happening there. Then we have civil war. Lots of migration happening which increased homelessness and then we start to see, you know, the first start legislation around homelessness happening really around these communities where there's been a lot of migration and that continues on and has continued on. And so a lot of the same patterns that we see throughout history in the history of migration, we hear the same things about immigrants now, right. So they're coming, they're going to take all the jobs, there's not enough housing, they're bringing disease, they're going to cause turmoil. And the history of homelessness in America is that same, that same suggestion throughout. I think one of the things that you said to me when we've met before, was, you know, you work with refugees and we work with homeless families and you just said, well, refugees are just international homeless families. So it's it's the same type of populations that that we're both working with here in just a different way of looking at it. They're categorized differently. So.

Mark Finney

Right. And I think you know, as we look at that and you talk about the reasons for homelessness, a lot of it goes back to issues of security and economics, right? Like, am I in a safe place? And do I have the means to provide for myself and my family, my kids? That's something that, I mean, you know way better than I do, that drives a lot of what's happening with our domestic sort of American born homeless population. And that's certainly what drives migration. You know, I don't talk to anybody from Ukraine or Venezuela or Angola or any of the other places where, you know, we have large groups of people we serve who said, you know, I just was tired of the view in the place that came from. And I wanted to come here or nobody says, you know, in America everything's super easy. So I just came here to collect my welfare check the rest of my life. Like nobody says that. They're all saying, you know what? I love the country I came from. It's super hard to learn a new language. I'm not pumped about that. You Americans are weird because, for example, in a lot of other parts of the world, people hang out on the streets and you have this vibrant social life and arts and food up everywhere in America, everybody drives in their garage at 5:00 PM when they get home and doesn't talk to each other. You know, there's a lot of things about our culture that are difficult for people who come here, but the reason they're willing to take on these challenges is especially families with kids. So globally more than 50% I mentioned 30 million refugees before, 50% or more of that number are ages 18 and younger.

Joe Ader

Really?

Mark Finney

So a huge number of folks who are impacted by violence, who make the decision to leave their country or people who have kids because, you know, maybe I'm willing to die in the country where I was born, but and then I have 4 kids. But if I was in a situation where the violence came to our region of the country, maybe I'd be willing to live here and and, you know, die on the soil I was born. And but my 7 year old is not somebody who I'm going to make go through that. You know, I'll take whatever risks I need to take to give him a better life and a better opportunity. That's what we see motivating all of these folks who are migrating is the opportunity to be in a safe place and the opportunity to, you know support your family and provide economically.

Emma Hughes

I heard a a poem in college that I really loved by Warsan Shire. Have you heard this? There's a line in it, the whole poem. She grew up in a family that had a history of fleeing their country and lives in east London. Now she's a poet and there's a line I'm not going to read the whole poem, but you really should, that says you have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

Mark Finney

Oh man. Yeah, totally.

Emma Hughes

And I feel like that is what you're getting at. Is it's really easy to look at somebody that has fled their community and be like, well, I wouldn't have or I would have had these resources or I would have... you don't know. You probably don't know. If our entire community burned to the ground sou probably wouldn't stay here. You'd probably go somewhere else. Where? That depends on a lot of other factors. But it's, you don't put your child in a boat. Unless it's safer to do so than to stay.

Mark Finney

Where you are right and I think that's really one of the things that we discussed a little bit in preparation for this conversation is common misconceptions about homeless folks, right. And sort of, if you imagine, you know, imagine a homeless person and the first picture that pops in your head is probably not 7 year old girl from Ukraine. Right? Or, you know, two twins who are 12, who come from Venezuela with their mom. That's probably not what you're thinking of, but the reality is that's a huge portion of what we actually are experiencing in our communities across this country right now. And the reasons behind that are super important if we're going to make a difference. Right? So a piece of it I think is is understanding the breadth of and the diversity of experiences here because as you said earlier, Joe, there's this, there's these storylines about like, oh, the immigrants are bringing these bad things or they're taking things away from us that is as old as America itself. You know, my, my ancestors were Irish. That's how I get my last name and my red beard. And if you go back 150 years and look at the rhetoric, even the things published in newspapers and some of the things discussed in Congress about the Irish, it was the Irish are just vermin, they're uncivilized. You know, they're Catholics and Catholics believe in the Pope and they're going to undermine democracy because they, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. You know, don't hire Irish people was a big theme for a couple of decades.

And the same has been true, you know, pick any wave of migration going all the way back to before the United States was founded. And that's there's been an undercurrent sometimes it's been the dominant current in political discourse about the negative effects of immigrants. However, when we look at the benefits of seasons of large immigration. It has a way of sort of washing out that rhetoric because it doesn't, it doesn't stand the test of time. And one, there's a couple of studies that just came out in the last month that I've, you know, I'm not surprised by, but I think a lot of maybe your listeners or other folks might be surprised by that immigration as much as it's been this point of contention nationally and even challenges a lot of social services in local communities, it's had a very strong, positive impact, even even recently. So about four weeks ago, the Congressional Congressional Budget Office in Washington, DC, a nonpartisan sort of group that just analyzes financial impact of things, the government does came out.

Emma Hughes

That sounds like a terrible job.

Mark Finney

Oh my gosh, it's not for me. I'm a people person. But there are people who like that. So I'm picturing a bunch of people in a basement with neon lights pouring over their typewriters and spreadsheets. Anyway, whatever they did they said that they came up, they they drew a connection because remember, a year or two ago we were hearing all this like doom and gloom, about the economy, right? You know, we've got inflation going crazy. We have all these empty jobs like, you know, we're headed for recession. And then it just didn't happen. The Congressional Budget Office said a key driver and why that didn't happen is that the last year and a half, we've had a huge number of immigrants, and they've actually floated the economy because they've come and filled so many of these jobs that we didn't have the American born workforce to fill. So and I I mean, I feel like even locally in our community as I don't have as many restaurants I drive by who say that their hours are limited or that they're, you know, they’re drive through only that's kind of gone away at the same time as we've received about five times as many refugees as we had you know 3-4 years.

Joe Ader

Very, very interesting.

Mark Finney

That's interesting, right? And they say that's true on a national level. Also out of the White House came a report just in the last couple of weeks that did a longitudinal study of all of the refugees who arrived between, I believe it was 2005 and 2014. I just saw this once, and I don't have a copy tight now so it could be a different 10 year period, but it's a recent 10 year period and what they found was just looking purely at at what the government spending happens to be with this group of folks, they found that when you put the amount of money that state and federal governments put into supporting refugees, all social services, so initial resettlement, but also food stamps, other things. And then you look at how much that same group of people paid in taxes. That group of refugees that came in the 10 year period added $123 billion into the government above what they cost. So economically, immigrants have been a huge boost both to our general economy and to our government tax basis.

Joe Ader

Very, very interesting. On the cultural aspect, I want to dive into that a little bit because you know we are that is kind of the main difference here between domestic family homelessness and those coming from other places. Just the cultural differences, and one of the things that we've noticed here in our communities, we have a high population of Ukrainian and Russian refugees or immigrants in our community we don't see them in the homeless shelters. But other populations, the Marshallese for, for example, we see them really frequently. And so I just wanted to talk about maybe some cultural differences, maybe you can enlighten us on why? Why are we not seeing the Ukrainians and the Russians? Why are we seeing, you know, maybe some other populations in what we would consider traditional shelters and then just some of the nuances of?

Mark Finney

That right, so one of the biggest driving factors both in why there's so many Slavic people in the Spokane community and certain other communities around the US where they cluster is that there was a wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe that came in the late 90s, early 2000s. Or actually through all the 90s into the 2000s that basically were coming here as the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union broke apart, there was a special program for folks who were persecuted because of being minority religions in that area. And this community, along with, you know, several others around the country ended up having a high proportion of Slavic people. So it was Ukrainians as well as people from Belarussia and Russia and Kazakhstan and other places. But Russian was the common language of the Soviet Union.

So it turns out that nobody designed it this way, but for whatever reason, a whole lot of people from what is now Ukraine came here 30 years ago. And so we have about 15 Russian speaking churches in Spokane. There's at least a half a dozen Slavic food stores, any number of all other kinds of businesses that are owned and operated by folks who are former Soviets. So not only is there a lot of relational connections that are drawing people here, when your cousin, your aunt, your grandma, your sister, who still lives over there, comes now that there's a war. There is also a lot of established infrastructure, so you can find somebody who will translate for you if you need to go to the DMV, even if the DMV doesn't have, you know, somebody there who speaks in Russian, because you have a big community here who will support you. But then there's also lots of jobs you can get in town where the business owner speaks English and Russian, so you don't have to learn English to get a job there. So that kind of establishment of an immigrant community makes it much easier for new folks to arrive and integrate in and with the Marshallese community, I know we've we're seeing a lot of them coming in the last several years, but we didn't have Marshallese folks in this part of the world 30 years ago that are now established owning their own businesses, you know, well established faith communities. So they just don't have the infrastructure that's developed yet. But in 15 or 20 years, I think that we'll probably see something similar if that community continues to grow.

Joe Ader

So that was, that's really helpful. And that comes back to a theme that we've heard throughout this podcast is how important community is to end the cycle of homelessness. End the negative impacts of homelessness in our community, but in every population, and I think that's what you're hitting on here when you're talking about the difference between, I mean, the Ukrainians who have established these communities and Russians and other Slavic people here versus the the newer immigrants that are just starting to develop those communities.

Mark Finney

Right, so this is not a paid plug for Pamily promise, but I'm a huge fan of what you guys do, and I often quote you, Joe. What I once heard you say that nobody's ever homeless because they run out of money, it's they're homeless because they've lost the relationships that, they need and I think that's very true when we look at our immigrant populations. You know, folks who come here, who already have some family in town or a cultural community, they they have of that social network and and that's really helpful. And in many ways can sort of absorb some of their needs as they arrive. Folks who come here without those relationships, they really struggle. And so part of what? We do is we actually looked not just to provide the social services as if you know our services solve the problem. Yes, we can play a specialized role, but a key piece of what we do is try to connect people not only to other social services but to actual community groups, right?

Like we have volunteers that come work with us and part of our programming especially for like single women is to connect them with American born women and so they develop friendships. It's not like, OK, you're gonna help with one specific thing of finding a job. It's like, no, once a month, we just have a big tea party so you can make American friends. Because we need to recreate that social network, the the one of the most painful losses that people repeatedly say as immigrants is not just, I don't have any money anymore and I used to have a thriving business, that's hard. It's I don't have community anymore. I left my family and my friends. They're all behind or they all scattered in different parts of the world. And I don't have those people who know me and who've shared the journey with me. And I I really wanna recreate that. So that's an area where when I started Thrive a couple years ago, we wanted to do more than just sort of hit those basic bottom chunks in Maslow's hierarchy of needs like food, shelter, medicine, yes, that matters. But our vision is to see people go from surviving to thriving, and that includes, you know, the basic necessities. It also includes being reconnected in in life-giving community where you can have friendships and people who know you and you can use the skills and passions that you have to invest in and generate health and other good things in your community.

Joe Ader

I was looking through the Thrive International website and looking at the different things in in your annual report, which is great by the way. And I noticed some really unique things in that. So like women only swim parties is highlighted as as a thing and I thought that was interesting. Maybe you share a little bit about how that came about and and really what the way that that connects into community.

Mark Finney

Yeah. So our our biggest program right now in this community is that we, I'll, I'll spare you the details, but shortly after the Ukraine War broke out and we end up with a with hundreds of families sort of couch surfing and living in people's church buildings and stuff from Ukraine, there was an empty hotel still move in, ready that we were able to lease and it's got about 100 rooms in it. So we started moving in Ukrainians and now we have other folks from other parts of the world as well. But it just so happens the hotel has an outdoor swimming pool. And uh, you know, we're doing, you know, basic social services, but everybody keeps asking about the pool. And so we made the decision early on that even though it's gonna take a little bit of money to get the pool cleaned up and, you know, the the equipment running that we were going to open the swimming pool. Because we wanted people not just to get housed.

We wanted them to experience joy and to catch a little bit of a vision for what it would be like to thrive here in the community. And that's one of the best decisions that we ever made because, you know, every summer, as folks go in the pool, whether it's kids in the youth program, whether it's residents, we find that folks forget the label, “refugee” or “homeless,” right? For a while, they're just kids swimming in a pool. Or they’re just parents watching their kids have fun in the summer time, which is, is that sort of humanizing dignity. We want to give back to people so that they can project that out and live out a better future. So we have a significant number of people that we serve from Afghanistan. In Syria and Middle Eastern communities, for whom you know, women are really aren't comfortable and aren't allowed to go, you know, swimming without having their heads covered and their the whole bodies in the, you know, large flowing clothing that's not terribly comfortable to be in the water in. And so one of them at some point said, “could we just have a party for just the ladies? Cause then if if we covered all the windows and nobody could see in the pool, we could all wear bathing suits and actually, have fun where there's no other place in this community, we can do that.”

So we said, of course, let's try it. And last July, we had 70 women show up and I I got my my office has a window that faces the pool, it was taped over so I couldn't see it, but I heard the splashing and the singing and the music and the joy. And then they loved it so much they did it again in August. We had 80 more ladies come, and that's the kind of thing where you don't think about that in traditional, you know, social services or homeless work. But a big piece of helping people move beyond dependency into self-sufficiency and ultimately thriving is giving them the chance to have joy and letting them dream and envision places and spaces where they can live their best life, even if it's just a few glimpses here and there. If they can have that early on in the process of integrating into a new community that can give them the hope and the vision that they need to build a better life for them and their family long term.

Emma Hughes

I wish that our community was able to view our domestic, our local challenges with homelessness through that sort of hopeful lens, because I think if we as housed community members who are to varying levels of stability, stable,  and our goal was how do we just infuse a little more joy in the world, in our relationships, how do we seek out people that currently are in a surviving space and see what we can do to just bring a little joy. That would change a lot of things.

Mark Finney

Yeah. You know, one of the biggest things that changes when you have joy is it it's a great equalizer. Right? Regardless of my status or position relative to yours, whether you're you know, let's say I'm a new immigrant and you've been here your whole life. Like, I don't speak your language. I don't have much money like I'm not really sure what's going on, but if our kids are playing together on the playground and we're seeing them smile, suddenly we're equals, right? Because we're both tapping into that very basic level of our own humanity. We all smile in the same language, right? And so one of the fundamental convictions that we have at thrive is that everybody has something to give, even if it's not obvious, even if it's not money, if you know whatever, like we assume that every immigrant who shows up has something to contribute that our community needs. It might be a business that they're going to start in three, five, ten years. It might be, we've had artists who've come and who are enriching our community by painting murals or doing other forms of art. We've got quite a number of people who bring culinary skills from other parts of the world and enrich our culinary scene here in the community, so we don't know what it is, but we know that everybody's got something to bring and I think that that's a conviction, you know that we share with you with you all is that we're not just looking to, to alleviate, suffering. We're looking to empower people because we recognize that we actually need the things that some of our more vulnerable community members could bring if they were given the chance.

Joe Ader

Yeah, there's a, the the book it's it's really old now, but How To Win Friends and Influence People. And in that book there's a quote where he says, I have not met a man that cannot best me at something right, and the idea behind it is everybody's got something that they can add, right? Every person you meet has something that they are better than you at and and they can enhance our community with that. And I think that's really helpful for me a lot of times because we meet people. I mean, in serious crisis. And a lot of times we might come in with this idea of, okay, well, we're we're in charge in that taking a step back and being like we all have our own issues. And we all have our own skills that could provide something unique that enhances this community as a whole. And if we aren't tapping into that, we're missing. We're missing what we could really be as a community, and so I I just love the way that you guys put that in the way that you do that empowering aspect of of the work that you.

Emma Hughes

As we wrap up our conversation today, what are any final points or reminders or encouragements that you want to make sure we share?

Mark Finney

I think right now we're living in a really interesting point in human history, whether that's in the local community, the national level, or globally, we've got more people migrating right now than at any point in human history, and we have this confluence of other crises that are, I think, stressing a lot of us out as we look at the news. But it's also a great time for ingenuity and innovation and a great time for collaboration. One of the things I really appreciate as we're looking at outside the box models of how do we build or acquire or get a hold of more housing units and make them available to refugees is there's a whole conversation with other housing providers, including yourselves and others about how do we all work together with a lot of creative ideas to tackle our housing crisis and our homelessness crisis and other overlapping crisis.

And I think it's really important that we have conversations like this kind of cross disciplinary because as as you all innovate in one area and we innovate in another and share ideas, I think there's really a lot of reasons to be hopeful about where we're going to go. But it really means that we have to stop operating in silos or only doing things the way we've always done it the the answers are out there. In some cases they are, you know, in the minds of a of a kid who's in a refugee camp right now. And in 20 years when he's had a chance to graduate from a university here in America and make some friends, or she that might be where some of our great solutions are coming from. So if we can continue to keep an open mind and keep working together, I think we're going to see the best of humanity emerged out of all this compounded crises.

Emma Hughes

Mic drop. Mark, thank you for being here with us today. Thank you for having this conversation and thank you for encouraging us to expand our perspectives while not overwhelming us with more crises. Like, I think that's a really easy thing to to feel like, oh my goodness, if I'm expanding my perspective, I'm just going to feel more overwhelmed. But this conversation expanded my perspective, and I actually just feel more hopeful. So thank you for for bringing that perspective and for, for starting that conversation.

Mark Finney

My pleasure. But I know that you all really and part of my back story, I'm also a faith leader and we've housed people in partnership with family promise in our church building for years. So I really get what you guys do and really appreciate it. One of the things I love is that way you treat people as people. They're not numbers. They're not statistics. Every person has their own story. And that's a key piece for us too. And so for for those of you who are listening, you know, the next time you see somebody who looks like they're new to your community, either because the way that they're, you know, their skin color or the way that they're dressed or an accent that they might speak with, try to remember, like, that person has a story and see them not as a category, but as an individual. And if you get a chance to actually develop that relationship, there's so much richness there. So I think that's critical to is is not to see the numbers, the 30 million or whatever, but the the one person or the one family. That's how we really get the most out of the opportunities we have with with immigrants and with other folks who are in vulnerable situations.

Joe Ader

I just want to wrap up here and and kick back to a thing that we we heard earlier from Doctor Manriquez in our episode that's on the corner of Homelessness and Healthcare. And he talked about, and I'm going to paraphrase him, and he said, you know. You may have a piece of cloth and I may have a piece of cloth. Until you create a seam till you create those connections, it's not a shirt.

Mark Finney

So good.

Joe Ader

Right? It's just pieces of cloth and I think and he said the important part is how we connect together those seams and I just appreciate you you have been bringing your thought to this and thrive international. Check them out. Go ahead and look at, look them up online. They've got work going on here in Spokane as well as in Seattle and are connected to a network of people kind of all throughout the country. The way that they put together the help for the Ukrainians in just dramatic fashion was is inspiring and so I encourage anybody that's interested. Look them up online and continue to support the work that they're doing there.

Emma Hughes

Today's conversation was, as we said at the very beginning, part one of just opening the door. I would encourage you to do more research, read more books, make a new friend, do all of the things that we talked about to continue this conversation in whatever way feels most honoring to you, and also contributes more to your curiosity. Get curious and let yourself follow that curiosity. As always, I'm Emma Hughes here with Joe Ader.

I want to say just some thank yous really fast to the team at Thrive, Mark and Company. You all are amazing. Thank you for sharing your expertise. Also want to thank the downtown Spokane Public Library for allowing us to record our podcast in their beautiful third floor recording studio, as well as the people who you don't see behind the scenes Gwyn Griffith, Cheree LaPierre, and our fact checker Emberley Jurgens all make this podcast possible.

If you want to jump in and support the work of family promise, there is a special opportunity for you from now through April 8th, 2024 to have any donations made to family promise of Spokane doubled or tripled. This is called Match Madness. We're super excited about it and want to invite you to be a part. So please check us out at familypromiseofspokane.org. And as always, we'll see you next time.

Joe Ader

Hopefully you're going to the theme, right? The relationship theme, the community theme.

Emma Hughes

Please feel free. Take it away.

Mark Finney

Theme song can we get a is there like a song that's part of that?

Emma Hughes

Joe, take it away.