Community Passageways Will Cut 13 Staff in Rainier Beach This Summer When City Contract Ends

Community Passageways will lay off 13 members of its staff after its City contract focused on violence intervention and school safety in Rainier Beach comes to an end on June 30. Most will be laid off beginning July 1, with five staying on through the end of August. 

In an eleventh-hour push to save the programs, more than 50 Community Passageways staff, student participants, and South End community members showed up at Seattle City Hall on June 23 to call on the Seattle City Council to intervene. The group also submitted a petition to save the jobs to the Council with 440 signatures. 

Speakers said they were worried that losing these programs would make Rainier Beach less safe. Many also lamented the impact the layoffs would have on the workers.

Community Passageways' Southeast Seattle team serves two main roles. 

Safe Passage staff are available to accompany students traveling to and from school and during lunch hour to act as a deterrent to violence. 

Resource Navigators work with students and their families on everything from housing applications and jobs coaching to assisting with the costs to play sports. They also provided grief counseling after two Rainier Beach high school students were shot and killed at a bus stop after school in January. 

The Seattle Human Services Department (HSD) previously contracted with the Boys & Girls Clubs' SE Network SafetyNet to do the safe passage and resource navigation work in Rainier Beach. That program ended after its Executive Director Marty Jackson and several family members were indicted in October 2024 for allegedly participating in a multistate drug-trafficking operation. 

The City turned to Community Passageways to take over that body of work and provided a $1 million contract to do so from March 2025 through December 2025. That contract was extended through June 2026 to "allow Community Passageways to ramp down the services on the interim contract," HSD spokesperson Caitlin Moran explained in an email to the Emerald. 

Crystal Lee, Community Passageways' co-director of the Southeast Seattle team, said the organization hired the non-managerial staff from the SE Network SafetyNet team to continue the Rainier Beach work.

Students who've worked with Community Passageways sang its praises in their testimony to the City Council. Suleyman, who only provided his first name, is a recent Rainier Beach High School graduate who said his case manager helped him navigate foster care and domestic violence and kept him on track in school.

"Without them, I don't believe I would've been able to graduate high school. In general, I think they should stay to help us persevere through high school," Suleyman told the councilmembers.

According to HSD, the contract was always meant to be a stopgap. The department held an open application process for its community violence intervention work, and in March announced $14.7 million in contracts awarded to more than a dozen nonprofits.

Community Passageways is among the groups receiving funding from HSD, but it did not get a contract to maintain its Rainier Beach team. Community Passageways' contract with HSD is for hospital-based intervention, citywide support services, work in the Central District, and school-based services. 

"I appreciate the way the City has supported this scope of work and been the biggest funders and supporters to make sure our work has been happening for years now," said Dominique Davis, Community Passageways' executive director.

HSD contracted with CHOOSE 180, Seattle Neighborhood Group, RECLAIM, Shine Kinesthetics, and Urban Family to work in Rainier Beach providing incident response, school safety and safe passage, conflict mediation and de-escalation, mentorship, case management, peer and family support, summer programming, and more.

In her email, HSD's Moran said, "The new model funds a broader network of services teens and young adults can access throughout the city."

HSD is providing an additional $150,000 each to Community Passageways and CHOOSE 180 to continue doing "short-term crisis prevention work and enhanced safety services" through Aug. 31 in response to the January student homicides.

Davis said he was grateful that the additional funding will allow him to keep five members of the Rainier Beach team on through the end of August to provide summer programming.

"Summer programming is very crucial in our community," explained Davis. "It keeps young people occupied and busy with a support system, because summer time is when the uptick in violence starts happening."

Some residents fear that the change in providers will make the neighborhood less safe.

Ingrid Chapman, a Rainier Beach resident and mother to a young daughter, helped organize the turnout for the recent showing in City Council chambers.

"As a parent knowing [Community Passageways is] one of the few things we have to keep our kids safe … we have to do everything we can to try and keep them there," said Chapman in an interview with the Emerald. "It's not just anybody who can come and do that. Those folks, a lot of them are from our neighborhood. They know the kids. The kids trust them. They're able to intervene by actually talking a kid out of doing something stupid."

Chapman also expressed frustration at a lack of explanation from the City about what's happening in the neighborhood. "We have not heard anybody tell us who's taking on the work in Rainier Beach. … Anybody else who comes in, it's going to take time to build trust, understand who the kids are, who the players are."

District 2 City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who represents southeast Seattle, acknowledged the frustration and told the Emerald, "I think the collective City owes the community an explanation of what's happening. I will continue to share information as much as I can."

Lin is a vocal supporter of community violence intervention as a public safety measure. He has been meeting with Community Passageways and HSD for months to try and find additional funding for the Rainier Beach work, and he said he will continue working in the City's midyear budget process to look for more money.

He wants the City to invest in community violence intervention on a much longer timeline, so "we aren't going through this crisis every year."

"It's not like we're ordering copy paper or something. These are careers and people's hiring and firing," said Lin. "We as a city don't just hire and fire staff immediately. You have to do long-range planning. We shouldn't expect any differently from our community partners who we ask, essentially, to do this work for us."

Davis said that he hasn't given up on finding more funding to at least keep the Rainier Beach team employed through the end of the next school year and is looking at the possibility of philanthropic support if money isn't available from a government entity.