photo by kjten22

The Central District Flickr Pool contains hundreds of images of scenes in and around our neighborhood. Interested in being part of it? Check out the pool here. If we like your photo, we may feature it on the front page of Central District News!

photo by Slack Action

CONNECT WITH YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. Attend the Squire Park Quarterly Meeting
Meet and welcome newly elected City Council member, Kshama Sawant.
SPCC Quarterly  Meeting
Saturday,January 11th 
10:00 a.m. to Noon at Centerstone, 722 18th Ave

The Squire Park Community Council Board Wants You!  New board members will be elected at the January 11 meeting. You could be one of them. New energy and ideas are the lifeblood of the organization. No experience is necessary — bring the desire to work for a great quality of life in our neighborhood. How and what can you or your neighbors contribute to the Community Council? What are your dreams for the community? Work is always easier with many hands. How can you help?

Connect with your neighbors.   Updates on Swedish Hospital’s master plan, Metro and the Central Transit Community Coalition,  and  the King County Juvenile Justice Center will also be presented.

Agenda:
Welcome & Refreshments

• Special guest: Kshama Sawant

• Board Member Elections

• Swedish MIMP Updates

•  King County Juvenile Justice Updates

• Central Transit Community Coalition update

• Your ideas and concerns

*Squire Park is bounded by 12th Avenue, E. Union Street, 23rd Avenue, and South Jackson Street.

The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), which develops, owns and operates affordable housing for the benefit of low-income people in Washington state, recently announced it was awarded $5.5 million from the Seattle Office of Housing. The award will enable LIHI to build 60 affordable units for families and individuals on LIHI property at 2020 S. Jackson Street. This is the current location of one of three Nickelsville homeless encampments in the Central District.

LIHI plans to house its offices on the first floor of the building. Above that, the building will have 15 studios, 20 one-bedroom, and 25 two-bedroom apartments. LIHI will rent the apartments or below 60% of the King County Area Median Income (AMI) — that’s an income of about $36,000 – $52,000, depending on the size of the household.

Sharon H. Lee, LIHI Executive Director, provided more details on the subsequent Nickelsville relocation in an email to Central District News:

This is the site that currently houses Nickelsville on Jackson. They will be looking for a new site later in 2014 to provide shelter for up to 35 men, women and children.  LIHI, Nickelsville, and the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church would like to thank the many neighbors who have donated food, warm clothing, toys and gift cards. They are in need of firewood, gift cards to purchase construction materials and food, and donations to pay for the honey buckets and utilities.

 

Credit: Runberg Architecture Group

This post is part of a series of profiles of Central District residents, part of the “People of the Central Area” project developed and written by Madeline Crowley.

About Laura:

Laura works tirelessly to share her years of knowledge from owning and running successful restaurants with lower-income community kids in the pursuit of Food Justice.

What made you choose the Central Area for the Green Plate Special project?

I was looking farther south when an opportunity arose with Marty Liebowitz of the Madrona Company, a family-owned contractor/builder and property owners. I thought it could be a good fit, being on the edge of the Central District but I wondered if Madrona was the demographic I was looking to serve in the first stage of our project. In reality, Madrona K-8 School has the highest rates of subsidized lunches in the city. Roughly 80% of the youth in the school are youth of color and many are financially struggling. So, it was an organic process; and it came to us in a really special way.

The Green Plate Special project teaches kids how to grow and tend food, but also about nutrition.

That’s correct, because 50% of what we do is in the garden and the rest is in the kitchen. The garden now is a temporary site, we’re moving farther south at the end of this year. We planned to build a kitchen in this garden but funding didn’t happen at that point. This kitchen now is in the Madrona Presbyterian Church. Since you don’t see an on-site kitchen, people have the impression it’s a youth garden program or a community garden. It is very much a community garden but our focus is on middle school youth. They get to experience the process of planting through harvest and then going into the kitchen to cook.

You touched on this earlier but why did you focus on the Central Area?

As the Central Area and south of it tend to be families of color, despite Seattle being liberal, we have a huge skew from white and black upper middle class and middle class to lower middle class people struggling financially. The lower middle class has high levels of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. In our community there’s a higher rate starting in elementary school of about 20-30% kids are overweight in the community of color. In the nation we’re about number three in that skew of what people of color are able to access in terms of healthy food, of what they know about nutrition as opposed to what upper middle class families have access to in terms of education and food.

Click here to read the rest of the story.