Camp Hope is gone, but Julie Garcia keeps going

When Julie Garcia was 39 years old, she had her second heart attack.

She was a mother of four, several years out of a tumultuous marriage. Her daughter had just given birth to her own daughter, and had fallen back into a cycle of drug use and homelessness, impervious to Garcia’s efforts to help her.

Her life was a wreck, she said, and she knew she needed to change.

“It was always a wreck,” she said. “I was always in survival mode because I’ve always been poor.”

When she recovered from her heart attack, which was caused by a rare disease that makes her veins and organs fragile, she decided she needed to change. She wanted to understand the world her daughter was living in, even if she was beyond her reach.

She started with sandwiches.

“I took my food stamp money and I made all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I could buy,” she said.

She took them down to the area around the House of Charity shelter, handed them out, began to make friends. That was 2015, and those sandwiches – and the relationships they helped form – became the seeds of Garcia’s continual, growing efforts to help and the people who live on the streets of Spokane.

In the years to follow, Garcia’s work expanded step by step, as did her unyielding and sometimes controversial advocacy.

She went from handing out sandwiches occasionally to handing them out most every day. She gathered volunteers to help and fed even more people, plugging holes in the system as they arose. She formed the nonprofit Jewels Helping Hands to operate a shelter when the city approached her and asked. When her friends couldn’t get a shower, she bought a mobile shower truck.

She was unyielding in challenging city policies and decisions that affected her friends. When she found services lacking, she helped set up camps in a city park, on the steps of City Hall, and eventually at Camp Hope – the East Central encampment that stayed open for about 18 months, grew to more than 600 people, became a political flashpoint and made Garcia a central figure in the debate over homelessness in Spokane.

“She’s a lightning rod on both sides,” said Joe Ader, the executive director of Family Promise of Spokane, which works to address family homelessness in Spokane. “There are people who like Julie and what she does, and there are people who don’t like Julie and what she does, and there’s not a lot of in between.”

What happened at Camp Hope fueled much of that dynamic. For more than a year, the encampment grew – well over 600 at its peak – and it remained in place for a year and a half, as the state and city battled over how to clear it and neighbors complained of serious problems with crime, drug use and disorder. There were fires at the camp, and two people died there. People blamed Garcia for forming and fostering that environment, enabling the behavior that was making life miserable for some neighbors.

Wendy Fishburne, a therapist with an office near the site and member of the East Sprague Business Association, described the camp as a perpetual nightmare for neighboring residents and businesses. While she did not direct her criticisms at Garcia personally and said she appreciated the “heart and compassion” behind the effort, she said that what resulted at Camp Hope was bad for the homeless and for the neighborhood – and she said that she was particularly concerned about the safety of women in the camp and unreported rapes.

“We all deserve better than ‘Camp Hope,’ which looked more like misery and despair to the humans within and the community around it,” she said in an email.

Garcia acknowledged that the camp grew out of her ability to control it, and that there were problems with crime in and around the site.

“I didn’t know how we would ever end that encampment,” she said.

But the core problem leading to the camp, she said, was the simple lack of somewhere else for people to go – even with a new city shelter, the availability of beds and services for the people in the camp. She said that a rapid sweep of the camp would not have addressed that void, and would have resulted in just scattering people to new camps.

“The reality is they don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said at the time – echoing a comment she would make repeatedly during the debates over the camp.

Camp Hope is gone, many of its former residents have been housed, and ongoing homeless services have been established as the result of a $24 million state-funded effort in which Jewels Helping Hands played an important role.

There’s a new mayor, and a new sheriff, a movement toward the formation of a regional homelessness authority – and a sense that change may be afoot in the direction of homeless policy in City Hall and regionwide.

And Garcia is still feeding and housing people. She’s running four small emergency shelters in churches around the city, relying on a contract with the city and volunteers.

“She does an amazing job of not forgetting what her focus is,” said Zeke Smith, the president of Empire Health Foundation, the main contractor overseeing the clearing of Camp Hope. “Her primary focus is to support what she calls ‘her friends’ – people who are homeless and houseless right now.”

Ben Stuckart, the former City Council president and current head of the Spokane Low-Income Housing Consortium who has worked alongside Garcia on several fronts, including a lawsuit filed against the recent anti-camping initiative, said that Garcia is always moving ahead, keyed in on the task at hand, even at times when some of the city’s elected officials were accusing her of malfeasance.

“No matter what is thrown at her or who attacks her, she gets stuff done,” he said.

For Garcia, it has been a dizzying ride. When she started meeting people on the streets, she had no involvement in city politics.

“Before 2018, I didn’t even know who our mayor was,” she said.

Now, on the other side of Camp Hope and a season of intense campaign battles, Garcia said she feels hopeful that there is a renewed spirit among government and service providers to find new ways to collaborate and be more effective in meeting the challenges.

And she says that she herself has changed. After years of passionate advocacy that was often attended by controversy and conflict – years in which she acknowledges that she sometimes viewed those who disagreed with her as “monsters” – she said she has a fresh appreciation for the need to collaborate and hear each other, and has spent time listening to neighbors where her services are offered and people who have different views about homelessness.

“How do we get to compromise?” she said. “You don’t want to see homeless people outside. I don’t want to see homeless people outside. Our reasoning may be different, but we want the same things.”

‘A courageous survivor’

When the early January forecasts began calling for a severe subzero freeze, Garcia was already trying to figure out a way to keep homeless people indoors.

Garcia has been a critic of the lackluster efforts by past city administrations to prepare for weather emergencies. So she set out to do what she could on her own, approaching churches as possible sites for warming centers. She said she spoke to more than 200 churches; four were open to providing shelter.

Meanwhile, Mayor Lisa Brown, mere days after her swearing in, was trying to find out what plans had been put in place before her arrival – and not finding anything. She and her new team had to scramble to come up with a plan, and it included providing support to Jewels to operate warming centers in four churches or former churches, as part of an overall expansion of emergency beds.

The shelters are still open, giving some 80 people a place to stay for the night. One site, at the former New Apostolic Church on North Cedar, accepts older people, disabled folks and those just released from the hospital, and is available overnight. A shelter at Morning Star Baptist is also open 24 hours a day, and two other churches are offering overnight services – Knox Presbyterian and Liberty Park United Methodist.

The city paid Jewels Helping Hands more than $34,000 to operate the shelters as expanded “surge capacity” during the weather emergency, and more than $116,000 to continue operating the shelters through the end of February. Jewels is also relying on a network of volunteers to feed, clothe and help the people in the warming centers.

Garcia sees the possibility of a longer-term model in these smaller operations – a pilot, of sorts, for a scatter-site shelter approach with smaller operations located around the city, as opposed to an intense concentration of hundreds of homeless people in a large shelter or camp.

“It’s bringing homeless services back into the community instead of warehousing them outside the community,” she said.

Garcia said she has learned from past projects, including warming centers that disrupted neighbors, about working with residents and establishing rules among people staying in the shelters.

A similar warming center plan operated by Jewels in 2021 at the Spokane Woman’s Club, for example, led to conflicts with the club’s officials over the terms of their agreement and escalating concerns from neighbors. Club officials said Jewels had moved into the building before final permission had been given, and accused Garcia of taking advantage of a board member to move in before the deal was final. Garcia said at the time that she had moved into the building after a city inspection was performed in the presence of a club official.

In the case of the current warming centers, Garcia said there was door-to-door outreach from neighbors beforehand and that there have not been complaints to the police about resident behavior.

At the New Apostolic Church on a recent Monday, Garcia talked about the church-based warming centers as residents rested on cots or sat in chairs in the parking lot, enjoying a rare burst of sunshine. Cots covered with blankets were fit snugly into two separate rooms; bins and stacks of blankets and clothing filled every inch of space.

At one point, volunteers brought in pans and trays of food.

“I love you guys and I appreciate you!” Garcia said.

Chris Bell, a 51-year-old woman who said she has lived on the streets, in shelters, and at Camp Hope, said the church has become her safe haven. And she credits Garcia for that.

“She’s a beautiful, courageous survivor,” Bell said. “I have the same story.”

‘She’s a doer’

Garcia grew up in Fruita, Colorado, one of four kids. While she points out that she has never lived on the streets or been a user of illegal drugs, she came from a background of poverty and trauma that helps her understand the trials of the people she’s working to help.

She and her first husband came to Spokane in 2004, where they had four children. There was violence and conflict in the home; Garcia doesn’t excuse what her former husband did to her, but she said she has come to realize that she played a role in creating an environment that wasn’t healthy for her kids.

“Here’s the way I look at it,” she said. “I spent a lot of time saying, ‘My husband did this, my husband did that.’ Never did I look at my own role. … I had a part to play in the toxicity of our time together.”

Garcia said that she and her former husband “made bad decisions continually,” and that their kids were traumatized as a result. They had split several years before she began having health problems.

At age 37, she had her first heart attack, as a result of Vascular Ehlers Danlos Disease, a rare, severe illness in which the organs and vascular system are extremely fragile and prone to tearing or rupturing; Garcia has had two heart attacks and two strokes resulting from the disease.

The median life span of someone with VEDS is 48, according to the National Institutes of Health. Garcia is 48 now, and she is unsentimental about what the disease is doing to her.

“I’m dying,” she said. “I know that my time here is going to end.”

Her initial diagnosis prompted her to begin making changes. Her estrangement from her daughter made her want to understand addiction and homelessness better. Garcia is raising her granddaughter, and her daughter is now housed, but they have little contact.

“I’m not the person who can help my daughter,” she said. “I’ve never been able to. But I can try to help other people’s daughters.”

As she began to meet people on the streets, “I got a crash course in what drugs and homelessness look like,” she said.

A key element of Garcia’s work on improving her life involved her Christian faith. Jewels is not a religious organization, but she sees her religious belief as a key element of her work.

“I believe 100% that Jesus is my Lord and Savior and I am trying to follow the example he set forth,” she said. “I don’t always do it right. I often do it wrong. But he commanded me to love my neighbor, and that’s what I’m doing.”

The scope of Garcia’s efforts grew crisis by crisis. Often, Garcia added a new element of service – whether it was expanding meals or buying a shower truck so people could get clean – when it became obvious there was a pressing need.

That dynamic is true on an individual level, with people calling Garcia regularly to ask for help for someone who has fallen into an emergency. And it’s true on a broader, organizational level as well – Garcia formed her nonprofit organization when she was asked by the city to consider operating a shelter that was in the planning stages, and she organized protests when she felt that the city was failing to respond effectively to the problem.

Ader, the director of Family Promise, said he first met Garcia when a shelter his organization was running in 2018 lost its food service during a kitchen remodel.

“For three months, Julie gathered groups of volunteers together to serve meals to our families,” he said.

Now, they are in contact regularly – Garcia sends families experiencing homelessness toward Family Promise, and Ader directs single people to Jewels. Ader said the way Garcia responded to his organization’s need typified the way she operates generally: “There’s a need, nobody’s filling it, so let’s fill it.”

Ader added, “She’s a doer. She just gets on the ground and does stuff.”

Escalating conflict

Jewels Helping Hands was awarded a city contract to run the low-barrier Cannon Street shelter by the former Condon administration, not long before the Woodward administration took over. Garcia had been the target of criticism before, and had raised hackles among elected officials and city officials, but that intensified in the years that followed.

It started with reports about the criminal record of Garcia’s husband, Jason Green, who works with her in Jewels. Green had pleaded guilty in 2013 to mail fraud and served a 2½-year sentence.

Garcia and Green addressed the matter at the time, saying they had not hidden Green’s record, and that he had served his time and returned, but that they felt attacked by the revelations.

Early in 2020, shortly after Nadine Woodward became mayor, the city announced plans to close the Cannon Street shelter as the contract with Jewels was set to expire. When Garcia was told there was not a plan for housing the 146 people who were then staying there, she purchased tents and the residents pitched them in Coeur d’Alene Park. The city eventually kept the shelter open, though with a different provider, and cleared the park.

The city opened an investigation into complaints lodged against Jewels, which included drug use and the use of racial epithets by staff members. Jewels denied virtually all the allegations. The city closed the investigation without formal findings against the organization and restored its ability to apply for city contracts in 2021.

As Spokane’s homelessness debate grew more factionalized, Jewels and the nonprofit Guardian Foundation – which had taken over the Cannon Street contract – became figures on either side of the divide, with the mayor and conservatives in city government tending to align with the Guardians, and the liberals on the council often aligning more with Jewels.

Conflicts played out with accusations between the providers and their supporters, disputes over whether the system had enough beds, conflict over contract awards and more. Garcia was often sharply critical of the Woodward administration, and an enmity grew – Garcia said it became a “totally personal” conflict, and Woodward would eventually accuse Garcia of stymieing progress at Camp Hope to make her look bad.

Near the end of Woodward’s term, the administration put a hold on awarding a contract for operating the Trent shelter after a committee had overwhelmingly recommended that Jewels receive the bid due to its extensive connections in the service community.

Woodward declined a request for an interview for this story.

Garcia and by extension Jewels, meanwhile, became a lightning rod for criticism and personal attacks.

“That’s what’s happened to Jewels Helping Hands since 2019,” she said.

The camp

The words “Camp Hope” entered Spokane’s lexicon in 2018.

At that time, it was not associated with Garcia, but a protest and hunger strike on the steps of City Hall carried out by Alfredo LLamedo, and then a group of others in tents on the front steps of City Hall.

Garcia organized the second one in December 2021, about 18 months after the short-lived encampment at Coeur d’Alene Park was cleared. Around 100 people eventually were camping in tents outside City Hall, frustrated by what they saw as the failures of the city to meet the needs of a growing homeless population.

“What we’re asking the city is: could they provide something?” she said at the time.

The city threatened to clear the camp, and Garcia went looking for somewhere they could move – settling on an empty lot owned by the state on the north side of Interstate 90 in East Central, where some people were already camping, she said.

The story of what came next has been covered in great detail, and the contours are well-known. The campers ignored a state order to vacate, and the camp grew. The city called for a rapid dismantling of the camp; the state was unwilling to do so without finding shelter for the campers to move to.

In summer 2022, Spokane received more than $24 million in state funds to clear the camp, part of a project aimed at clearing homeless camps in rights-of-way across Washington.

The project was run by the Department of Commerce, for which Brown, now Spokane’s mayor, was the director. The Empire Health Foundation was contracted to oversee the work, and it subcontracted with Jewels to do the outreach.

At the same time, the Woodward administration’s key homelessness effort, a shelter located in a former warehouse on Trent Avenue, was moving forward; it would eventually receive significant funding from the Department of Commerce project, as well.

Smith, the president of Empire Health Foundation, said Garcia was a crucial player in the effort, because no other provider had the relationships that she and her team did. Jewels worked on outreach, making connections with those in the camp, helping connect them to services, and moving them toward housing, and Garcia was hands-on with every aspect of the operation.

The first time Smith went to Camp Hope, “She was standing on top of a dumpster, trying to fit stuff into the dumpster, because there was so much garbage and so little garbage pickup,” he said. “She’s not unwilling to get dirty in order to do the work.”

The state project erected a fence around the camp, required campers to get ID badges, established a range of services, and began to move campers, one by one, into housing.

But the effort was much slower than many wished. Many neighbors and businesses complained of crime, drug use and disorder. Camp organizers sparred with police over their lack of response to crime inside the camp. Lawsuits were threatened and filed. Officials debated whether the large infusion of state funds was making a difference.

The members of the East Spokane Business Association held a news conference in November 2022, outlining problems with drug use, property damage and other “enormous, deleterious effects” of the camp. They called for an end to the camp by Thanksgiving.

“A lot of people don’t feel protected in our neighborhood right now,” said Michael Brown, the owner of Fresh Soul restaurant.

Fishburne said she joined the ESBA specifically because of the problems with Camp Hope. She’s a marriage and family therapist who described herself in an email as “absolutely in the field of compassion.”

Her office at the Tapio Office Center was a frequent site of vandalism and even violent encounters – she described finding shattered glass in the front door, bathrooms “bloodied and fouled.”

“So, from a business perspective, the encampment was a nightmare!” she wrote. “From a human perspective … humans deserve SO much better than to live in squalor and violence.”

Garcia acknowledged problems associated with the camp; on occasion, she said that city police were not responding to reports of crime within the camp. She also frequently pointed out that many campers were forming bonds of community – something that is often desperately lacking among homeless people.

She said she shared the concerns people had about the effects of Camp Hope on residents and neighbors; what she had hoped to see, she said, was a more robust effort by the city and others to address the needs that the camp represented and to understand that the depth of the problems could not be quickly and easily addressed.

The conflict escalated once Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich leaped in, saying he would help clear the camp quickly. In news conferences and appearances on Fox News, he accused state and local officials of intentionally keeping the camp open as a kind of grift. At different points, often appearing alongside Woodward, he said that his office was investigating Jewels – and that he had urged state and federal officials to do so.

For all the bluster and litigation, the camp closure proceeded along the lines set out by the state project. It wasn’t closed for good until June . Nearly 280 people were housed as part of the effort, with more than 200 still housed, Smith said.

But the idea that there was embezzlement or fraud in the project settled in among Garcia’s detractors, which Garcia and Smith insist is false and for which no specific evidence has been presented.

During the mayoral campaign, Woodward accused Garcia of “lining her pockets” with $1.6 million in state money for Camp Hope; conservatives working to elect the mayor pored over her social media accounts, questioned a staff retreat her organization took, criticized her for everything from being an enabler to the sparkly, flashy style she likes to sport.

Garcia and Brown were linked, often painted as co-conspirators.

‘A great life’

Jewels Helping Hands was paid $1.6 million for its Camp Hope work, as Garcia acknowledges. As for lining her pockets: She was paid an annual salary of $25,600 in 2022, according to the group’s tax filings. Last year, she said, she got a raise to $40,000.

She and Smith vigorously deny the claims that she was exorbitantly paid or mismanaged money. The $40,000 she said she earned last year was the highest salary Jewels reported on any of its tax forms since it was formed in 2019.

“The sheriff and the mayor, specifically, attacked Julie and service providers generally for engaging in fraud and for getting rich off homeless services, both of which are flat-out lies,” Smith said.

Defenders of Garcia point out that even as the accusations were being levied against Garcia, that the city’s contractor on the Trent shelter, the Guardians, came forward and reported that a bookkeeper had embezzled perhaps more than $100,000. At the time, Knezovich said that was a “regulatory matter,” and that “there’s nothing criminal.”

Brown said that, despite the presumptions that she was working hand-in-hand with Garcia, that she had only come across Garcia once or twice before Camp Hope. During the work to clear the camp, they began to know each other better, and during the formulation of the city’s warming response, they came to know each other even better, Brown said last week.

It was the Empire Health Foundation, not Commerce, who selected Jewels as a subcontractor, and Brown left her state post to run for mayor in early 2023. Brown said she has never seen any concrete foundation for the allegations that were levied against Garcia.

Now, Brown said, she and Garcia reach out to each other with questions or concerns – a relationship similar to the one the mayor has with many others involved in homelessness, she said. Brown said that such collaborations are going to be vital as Spokane tries to address homelessness.

“I have a lot of respect for the way she takes it on and tells you what she thinks,” Brown said.

“She’s always learning, also, and that’s one of the things I admire about her.”

Brown said Garcia is a big part of the ongoing efforts to find more effective solutions to homelessness.

“I feel like there are a lot of people and organizations that want to pull together and have an effect,” Brown said.

“Is it going to be easy? No. It is going to be quick? Probably not. But we want this to be a definite inflection point in a positive direction, and I think it can be.”

It’s a long way from the days when Garcia didn’t even know who the mayor was, and her point of contact was a sandwich. Jewels operates an organization with outreach efforts across the board; its operating budget for 2022, based on donations and contracts, was more than $700,000.

These days, Garcia is seen a lot differently at City Hall. She has moved from a tent outside to collaborating with those developing city policy inside.

But her focus has stayed the same: Helping her friends. The people in need right now.

It’s a life-or-death mission for her, without hyperbole – she’s seen too many people die on the streets, she says.

As for her own future and health, she said she is just going to continue her work while she can.

“I’ve had a great life, brother,” she said.