They Rethought Services to Deliver $9 Million in COVID Relief
A stack of one hundred boxes containing emergency food supplies sat on a commercial truck, awaiting unpacking and distribution from Kent, Washington. But the staff meeting them were not trained supply chain workers. They were Open Doors for Multicultural Families, a direct-service non-profit focused on disability-related resources and services. They stood on the trailer, beginning to remove the industrial-strength plastic wrap that held the boxes together. The boxes began teetering and swaying. Working together, the staff formed a ring around the stack to keep it from collapsing as they unpacked the vital resources.
It was a telling moment in the huge undertaking Open Doors had embarked upon, a long way from the non-profit Ginger Kwan founded in her kitchen in 2009. It was early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the staff were responding to desperate community need—schools had closed, families were on lockdown, many had lost jobs, and most needed to stay home to care for their children. Families were running out of money and needed food, rent relief, and other emergency aid.
Open Doors transitioned its service delivery from a more traditional case management model into a warehouse, a packing center, a food delivery service, and eventually, a rent relief operation. Despite this change, Open Doors remained committed to their cultural brokering model to targeting services for culturally and linguistically diverse individuals with development or intellectual disabilities. Open Doors’ staff of 57 collectively speaks 19 languages, is composed of 93% people of color, 61% immigrants/refugees, and 38% parent or family member to a person with an intellectual or developmental disability.
Soon they would take on an even bigger project. King County approached them with a small initial amount of rent relief funding that quickly expanded to millions of dollars, and suddenly Open Doors had “fat stacks” to distribute with the same staff that was already overloaded providing emergency food and personal protective equipment (PPE), in addition to transitioning to more virtual case management.
The Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (WDC), with humanitarian relief funding from the Department of Labor, worked with Asian Counseling and Referral Services (ACRS) to create and staff three full-time positions for Open Doors’ new COVID-19 Relief Team. The new hires quickly proved their value on the rent relief project, going to knock on landlord’s doors to get them to sign paperwork, offering multi-lingual services to clients, and bringing community perspective and creativity to solving tough problems.
By hiring people from the community, Open Doors cultivated understanding of the needs of the people they serve. They integrated PPE and food relief into a single delivery package, including information tailored to the families’ own languages, drove the rental assistance program, and even represented Open Doors in meetings with King County.
One staff member, Joann, had been a client of Open Doors in the past, and was able to give back in a Program Assistant role. Another staff member, Maria, worked primarily with Spanish-speaking clients and made incredible progress with her own English in just 6-7 months on the team. She continued her work serving different cultures through King County’s Eviction Prevention and Rent Assistance team.
With support from additional staff, Open Doors delivered nearly $9 million in relief funding to the local community in just 7 months between June-December 2021, the vast majority for rent relief. In that time, the organization served 2,397 individuals, including 941 people with disabilities, and 342 youth with disabilities.