How do you celebrate 50 years of life-changing work, touching nearly 2 million people, in just one evening?

At Solid Ground, we gathered with a few hundred of our friends – participants, partners, donors, staff, and volunteers – to honor personal triumphs, reflect on pioneering innovations, and rejoice in the legacy of lives changed, all while sharing great food, drinks, and music! We also shared a vision for our community in the years to come, raising nearly $300,000 to support Solid Ground’s programs and the people they serve.

Because like everything we do, Solid Ground’s 50th Anniversary Gala on May 8 was a night all about community.

“From the earliest days as a scrappy neighborhood service center to today, the primary driver for all of Solid Ground’s work and impact has been that we are deeply rooted in community,” CEO Shalimar Gonzales told the more than 300 people gathered at the brand-new Summit building in downtown Seattle. “What we do, the services we provide, and how we provide them, have always been in response to what community has told us they need.”

‘Nurturing a resilient community’

Fittingly for Solid Ground, our 50th Anniversary Gala was less about commemorating the start of an organization than it was about celebrating a community – along with all of the people who continue to shape it.

It was also a reminder that from our start in 1974 as the Fremont Public Association (FPA) to our work today as Solid Ground, our organization has always been at its best when the people we serve and the people who lead our work are the same people.

And no one embodies that value more than Mary Ruffin, Chair of Solid Ground’s Board of Directors. Mary’s journey to lead our organization started when she was a college student and her family became homeless – “a reality I had naively thought was not possible.”

“We no longer had a home, and we were flailing without a safety net to catch us,” Mary told the audience. “Or so we thought.”

After countless calls seeking help, Mary’s family connected with Solid Ground and was welcomed into our supportive housing programs. Once settled into their new apartment on Solid Ground’s Sand Point Housing campus, Mary had the stability to finish her undergraduate education and then earn her law degree. Her mother went back to school and made friends among Sand Point residents and staff, earning a reputation as a community leader and advocate. Her younger brother flourished with the support of youth programs at Sand Point.

But, Mary said, one of the best parts of life at Sand Point was “the opportunity to meet some of the most generous and neighborly people I have met to date – neighbors that had so little and yet seemed to have boundless generosity.”

“Solid Ground was nurturing a resilient community – a community of people that leaned on one another through hardship, relied on one another for support, and advocated for ourselves,” she said.

Mary became committed to advocating for the Sand Point community as well, so she jumped at an opportunity to join Solid Ground’s Community Accountability Council (CAC), a group of community members charged with ensuring that Solid Ground remains responsive to the needs of the people we serve. Two years later in 2021, Mary was chosen to join the agency’s Board of Directors, helping to institutionalize the CAC’s role in selecting new board members. She became Board Chair in 2023.

“This position means more than a title – it means I have real, tangible power in the decision-making processes. It means that I can be an active participant in bringing the real-world impacts of our decisions on the communities we serve to the forefront,” she said. “This role is not only a testament to Solid Ground’s commitment to inclusion and giving communities a voice, but also a personal milestone that highlights how lived experience and leadership can merge to forge a chain reaction of community empowerment.”

‘An incubator of hope’

Mary’s journey – as a member of the Solid Ground community who’s gone on to serve as a leader and changemaker – was echoed throughout the night in one story after another. Together, these stories are part of Solid Ground’s legacy as an “incubator of hope,” as Shalimar put it, helping to nurture community leaders and organizations that have changed countless lives across King County over the last half century.

Several of those people and agencies were highlighted in a short film titled 50 Years of Cultivating Leadership, which premiered at the Gala.

Among the leaders featured was Patricia Flores, a former resident of Solid Ground’s Broadview Shelter & Transitional Housing, who later went on to become a sexual assault advocate and Executive Director of Catherine Place. Patricia was also in the room for the celebration, so after the film was over, she took the stage to describe how the support she received at Broadview helped set her on a lifelong journey as an advocate and community leader.

It’s been 30 years since Patricia escaped an abusive relationship and arrived at Broadview with her daughter and grandson, but the memory – and relief – of that day in 1994 remains fresh in her memory.

“I felt like I couldn’t take a full breath during that crisis,” Patricia recalled with tears in her eyes. “And once we got into our room at the Broadview shelter, I felt like I could finally exhale and inhale, and we felt safer.”

“Landing at Broadview at that time – and it really does feel like it was just yesterday – gave me the stability I needed, the ‘solid ground,’ as a single mom with a teen daughter and a 9-month-old grandson. That was life changing.”

‘A risky thing to do’

We also took time to honor a few of the people who led Solid Ground through some of our most formative years and helped shape who we are as an organization today. In recognition of their work and legacy, Solid Ground presented lifetime achievement awards to two former executive directors: Rep. Frank Chopp and Cheryl Cobbs Murphy.

Both leaders grew Solid Ground as an organization and oversaw the launch of critical new programs in response to emerging needs in our community. But Cheryl left an even more profound legacy by naming racism as a root cause of poverty and committing Solid Ground to anti-racism work.

“Today, Solid Ground is built on the understanding that racism and other forms of oppression are fundamental causes of poverty,” Shalimar said. “Many nonprofits now share this belief as well, and others at least talk about it. But when Cheryl first took over as the Fremont Public Association ED, very few in the mainstream nonprofit sector shared the belief that racism had anything to do with poverty.”

Cheryl said she was honored to receive the award, but wanted to make it clear that she didn’t do any of her work alone, crediting the commitment of her colleagues at Solid Ground who shared her belief that we couldn’t solve poverty without addressing institutional racism.

“It was a risky thing to do since we had no idea how our funders, our donors, and in fact the community would respond,” she said. “I am proud of the efforts we undertook to assure that the people we serve had a voice in how our services are provided, understanding that they knew best what they need to succeed.

“I am proud of the forums we held to educate the broader community about institutional racism, knowing this was work we could not do alone. I am even prouder that this work continues today under Shalimar’s incredible leadership.”

‘Their uplift is real’

And finally, we heard from Omari Salisbury, a native of Seattle’s Central District, who’s earned a reputation as a media pioneer and authentic communicator as co-founder of Converge Media. Omari said he’s been asked to give keynote speeches many times in the years since Converge leaped onto the national stage amid the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, but he turned them all down up until that night.

“I did not want to be a keynote speaker at an event where me and my colleagues at Converge Media were not firm believers in their cause,” Omari said. He accepted the invitation to speak at Sold Ground’s Gala only after “understanding their mission, their people, their purpose, and the impact they make on community.

“And I realized that their mission is noble, their people are committed, and very much like us at Converge, their uplift is real.”

Image at top: Solid Ground’s Board Vice Chair, Hannah Won, enjoys the Gala photobooth with her friends. (All photos in this post are by Michael B. Maine | All Rights Reserved.)