Debbie Lacy, Founder and Executive Director of Eastside for All, reflects on this past year and what energizes her about continuing EFA’s work into 2022.
What were your goals for 2021 and did you achieve them?
We established Eastside For All (EFA) at the end of 2019. Five months after we had our first founding board meeting, COVID hit. We were new as an organization and thrust into this new world that we’re in right now. So for EFA, 2021 was about getting centered and striving to be more proactive than reactive.
2021 was about responding to the various crises brought by this new world. The Eastside Renters in Crisis was convened in 2020 to support people at risk of homelessness and displacement. This collaborative partnership of local and state organizations came together to advocate for policy changes in East King County cities that would protect renters.
Another major goal for EFA was around placemaking. This experience of the pandemic demonstrated how important it is to have physical space for connecting with one another, to get help, share resources, and be in community. Most importantly, to have spaces that represent and reflect our communities of color. That’s why equitable placemaking became such a priority for us in 2021, leading EFA to launch Build for Belonging. The conversations we’ve been having around this initiative is resonating with the communities in our cities on the Eastside
Today, we have to be able to talk about belonging, inclusion and equity in intangible as well as tangible spaces. We had to go online to create these spaces, and even digitally we were not safe from racist harm.
We need physical community spaces where there’s a low barrier for entry, where everybody’s welcome, where there is no set agenda; where you can come in and be with the community. Those kinds of spaces are rare, particularly in this area that lacks affordability across the board.
As a part of the Friends of Bellevue Cross Cultural Center, EFA continued to support the City of Bellevue’s feasibility study for a cross-cultural center. The City of Bellevue started this initiative several years ago, and it perfectly aligns with what EFA believes in — a place where there’s intentionality about a physical building created for the purpose of bringing people together across racial and cultural differences. It’s not just for people to enjoy cultural performances or lectures, but a space where we can honor each other, learn, and co-create around shared values.
While EFA is not yet in a position to purchase land and create these spaces ourselves, we want to keep bringing the spirit of inclusion to the forefront when cities have an opportunity to create a new community center or renovate existing spaces. Can we make it unique to our region, unique to the cultures that have history here and are still contributing every single day? That’s the conversation that we keep advocating for. I do have a big goal for EFA to someday have the means to partner with developers and investors to physically create spaces like this.
What do you mean about being more proactive rather than reactive? Can you give some examples?
In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd and the rise in anti-Asian violence, we saw a tremendous focus on anti-racism, including from people and groups who had never before held racial equity as a priority. So there was a lot of attention placed on the brutality of racism in our country and in our local communities. We did have to react and respond. Suddenly many more people and groups were calling for help to be more involved in racial equity efforts. People of color demanded action. Again.
We joined the King County Coalition Against Hate and Bias as part of our Stronger Than Hate initiative. That coalition produced the Hate and Bias Incident Report Survey. We can now use that data collected in the survey to proactively work towards systemic change and ingrain anti-racism work into our institution’s infrastructures through the work outlined in EFA’s Anti-Racism and Social Justice Initiatives. We building a way to respond to incidents, but also create the changes required to hopefully minimize and prevent these incidents from happening in our community. It’s a long journey, but one we’re hopeful about.
Heading into 2022, we continue to exist in a time of crisis. And let’s not forget that the people who are being harmed were already hurting before. The multiple crises disproportionately impact people of color and low income people in our community. We need to make sure we’re taking care of the immediate crisis. But at the same time we need to build an anti-racism and social justice vision for our communities through exercising our civic power.
What were your metrics for “success” for 2021?
The core of what we do is relationship focused. The challenge is how do we measure the quality of these relationships? For example, just because you’re invited doesn’t mean that you belong.
Just because we see diversity in a room or in a zoom event, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s equity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging. We have to look at who’s making the decisions. Who’s being elected to office, who’s serving on planning commissions and school boards?
So part of it is about representation. I started looking at the demographics of our city councils and our school boards around 2016 or 2017. And of course, they were predominantly White. It has started to shift very slowly, but it’s still not keeping pace with the quickly changing demographics of our cities. So representation is one metric that I look at. It’s concrete.
What’s not as easy to track is the spirit of engagement, true participation and involvement. I am seeing a shift starting to happen where people feel they do have a say. People are starting to use their voice to communicate what’s important to them, what their needs are, and what possible solutions could be. This is very much needed. Moving forward EFA wants to provide more resources to help communities organize and advocate. A start is our Advocacy Hub, which aims to provide information and support calls to action. In 2021 we partnered with Safe Haven, the Muslim Community Network Association, and Indian American Community Services to do “advocacy 101” training for people of color and immigrants. Nearly 100 community members participated and we’re growing that work in 2022.
I’ve heard people talk about equity and belonging for a long time. And I don’t want to discount the efforts of our city governments and others in the community who have made significant declarations and committed resources. For example, the City of Redmond for the first time has a DEI staff person. The City of Kirkland is about to hire their first staff person to lead their DEI efforts in the new year. These are not small steps. We saw a Latina woman get appointed to serve on the Human Services Commission for the City of Kirkland.The cities are doing exactly what we’ve asked them to do, which is to invest in their own infrastructure to be able to provide the professional expertise and staffing to more fully support the community.
We need to foster more leaders who are deeply rooted in their community, who value racial equity and social justice and know how to move communities forward with leadership vision. We want to create pathways for leadership from youth to adults through mobilizing, organizing and leaning on our institutions to make the policy changes required that provide more equitable opportunities for everyone.
This can really be intimidating for people. It’s a specific form of working with government. We need to build in more ways for people to understand how government works, who’s leading in our governments, and how people can influence change.
We still see a minority of voters turning out to vote, even in this past election. We should not see such low turnout at a time when our democracy has been under threat for quite some time. We will know that people are listening and “walking the talk” when we start to see the transformation happening. When we have people who are invited to participate in community engagement efforts enthusiastically show up, because they know the last time they came they were heard and something came of their contributions and their input. When that does not happen, we see diminished returns. People don’t show up if they’re not being heard, and if they don’t see people from their own communities helping to lead the way.
How did what you learn in 2021 inform your plans for 2022?
For lack of capacity, I did not have a lot of time to focus on fundraising. And yet somehow since September we’ve raised over $350,000 committed dollars. That’s going to allow us to have a really strong start to the new year.
A really exciting partnership that stemmed out of Eastside Renters in Crisis, and that was funded by the Seattle Foundation, will continue in 2022. We initially came together to mobilize our communities for renter protections. What we ended up doing was building a foundation for more civic participation and movement building. And for the first time in East King County, we saw BIPOC and immigrant community members poised to organize together for housing justice. We had nearly 100 BIPOC community members trained in fundamental advocacy strategies.
EFA is going to help hire a full time housing justice organizer to work with our communities of color on the Eastside. This involves mobilizing communities for more affordable housing, strengthening support for people without homes, and advancing renter protections, tenant protections and tenant rights.
When we have dozens of landlords emailing the city councils, and people who are opposed to equity initiatives showing up en masse for meetings, that blocks critical advancements. We need to see the same strength in numbers from people who care about and value what we do. No matter the values of our elected leaders, at the end of the day, it is the volume of comments they are hearing that influences their votes. We have to be able to mobilize and speak up to be heard.
Final thoughts on 2021 and the path forward into 2022?
EFA was created because there wasn’t an infrastructure in East King County that supported racial equity and social justice. For instance, there was no outward facing government initiative on immigrant and refugee affairs. In response, EFA and other community organizations and public agencies have built public private partnerships to persistently advance these goals in our communities. We want to institutionalize racial equity. That requires infrastructure building, and community advocacy is key to that. We need that leadership. And we need community centered approaches that are deeply rooted, sensitive to, and knowledgeable about what their own communities need and the solutions that will be best for them. Without lifting those voices, we can’t move forward.
The violence of white supremacy keeps us as communities of color from being as powerful as we can be. It is intended to intimidate and silence. So what are we going to do about it? We need to center our work around creating and supporting communities of color to be as strong as we possibly can be. We need to do this loudly, visibly, and persistently.
That’s in large part why EFA’s focus is so narrow geographically. We want people to have a sense of ownership and attachment to where they live, work and play. To have a sense of ownership. To be inspired to take care of one another.
Organizing, mobilizing community members, and creating pathways for leadership are the vehicles for transformation that I hope all of us will continue to invest in.
Keep showing up.
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