Islanders are finding out more about the Seattle Indian Health Board’s plans to open a 92-bed residential treatment center on Vashon for those seeking recovery from substance abuse.

The treatment center will be open to all, according to the Health Board, but rooted in Indigenous knowledge and traditional medicine.

In late March, the Health Board purchased the former Vashon Community Care (VCC) facility for $11 million from its nonprofit owner, Transforming Age.

In recent weeks, the Health Board has engaged with islanders in numerous ways, including holding meetings with Vashon’s Health Care District and Vashon HouseHold.

Leaders of the organization and staff members also marched in Vashon’s Strawberry Festival parade, showing off the organization’s mobile healthcare clinic, and staffed a busy festival booth throughout the festival, answering islanders’ questions.

At a Vashon-Maury Island Community Council meeting on July 20, Esther Lucero (Diné), the Health Board’s President & CEO, Ryan Gilbert, its Chief Operations Officer, and Socia Love-Thurman M.D. (Delaware/Yuchi, Cherokee), its Chief Health Officer, provided still more information, saying they anticipate the facility will open in 18 to 24 months.

One detail of the property will be more immediately visible, Lucero and Gilbert said.

In coming weeks, the Health Board will erect a cedar fence with an ornamental gate at the facility, due to repeated break-ins and theft on the property since the time of its purchase — something Lucero said had surprised her.

“What is important to me is that we keep our relatives that we are providing services for safe,” Lucero said. “In addition to the fact that I do not want our traditional ceremonial spaces desecrated.”

(The Health Board calls all its patients “relatives,” indicating that all who seek their care are treated as family members.)

Gilbert said there have been about six incidents of property crime at the facility. In addition to break-ins, drug paraphernalia had been left in the building, he said, and diesel fuel had been stolen from the Health Board’s generator.

In discussing the timeline for opening the facility, Gilbert said that a 120-day due diligence process had determined that the building’s septic and other systems met all permitting requirements for its new use, and a request for proposals from contractors to work on the project will close next week.

Brian Springfield, an islander, has been hired as the facility’s environmental services director.

Johnpaul Jones, the renowned Choctaw architect perhaps best known as the chief designer of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, has been hired to re-imagine the VCC building and grounds in an Indigenous way, Lucero said.

Elements of his design, she said, will include ceremonial spaces, a sweat lodge, and possibly a longhouse.

The Health Board has engaged with tribal partners about its plans, said Lucero, who added that tribes have expressed strong interest in making a canoe journey to Vashon when the facility opens.

Lucero said that the Health Board is still working to find creative ways to address its workforce challenges.

“We know that we will be providing jobs for folks who live on Vashon, and we also know that in regards to specialty providers, we will probably have to rotate those folks,” she said.

Notably, Lucero is also still focused on finding a way to provide 24-hour ferry service to and from Vashon — an important consideration for patients who need immediate access to a treatment program.

In this quest, Lucero said, she is soliciting help from King County, tribal partners who operate ferries, and Senator Patty Murray, who toured Washington State Ferries Mukilteo terminal with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg last week.

“I want you to know that we have really good connections,” Lucero said, adding that she will not stop until she has found a creative solution to Vashon’s transportation challenges.

Wrap-around care

At the community council meeting, Health Care board leaders described how the new facility will provide wrap-around services to all who sought treatment, including dental and mental health care, as well as medically assisted treatments including low-barrier Buprenorphine.

Methadone treatment will not be offered at the facility, they said, because the Health Board believes it is more dangerous.

Lucero and Love-Thurman both spoke at length, detailing the organization’s approach to healthcare based on Indigenous knowledge, its 52-year history, and its strong financial footing as both an Urban Indian Health Organization and a federally qualified health center.

Since 2015, Lucero said, the Health Center’s revenues have grown from $10 million to $50 million.

“I want to tell you that because there have been concerns about our financial viability, whether or not we’re going to stick around,” she said. “We’ve already been here for 52 years, and we have at least 100 more coming.”

Lucero also recounted how the organization arrived on Vashon, after closing its former in-patient treatment center in 2019. The aging facility, called Thunderbird Recovery Center, had operated for 33 years in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle.

At Thunderbird, 61% of those who sought treatment completed its 45-day residential program — the highest success rate among treatment centers in the state, she said.

However, the facility had not been able to offer treatment to pregnant and parenting people — a critically important need, according to Lucero.

On Vashon, she said, the treatment center would reserve 10 beds for this population, allowing parents to bring up to two children ages 5 and younger to reside with them at the treatment center while they received treatment.

As the organization looked for property, Lucero said that she kept thinking, ‘‘We need a beautiful place where these moms and babies and families can heal.”

The Health Board had looked at many properties, in North Bend, Snoqualmie, and other locations, before arriving on Vashon, she said.

“When we stopped on the property that was formerly VCC, I knew healing happened there,” she said. “Because finally, we found a place our people deserve — they could move away from anything that caused them trauma and propelled addiction. We knew that we could pull them away just long enough to help them get healthy. That’s how we landed here.”

Questions from islanders

The Health Board’s leadership also took questions from the audience at the meeting, comprised of about 25 islanders who attended in person and approximately 50 more who attended online.

Some questions from neighbors to the facility concerned noise, traffic and parking issues, and when the design schematics for the new facility would be shown to them.

Lucero said that the designs were not yet final, but would be shared when they were ready.

Islander Steven Nourse, an educator who has previous experience working with incarcerated women in preparation for their return to their communities, asked the Health Board how he could help.

Love-Thurman expressed gratitude for Nourse’s interest in working with the organization, saying the Health Board was eager to engage local service providers and also hire child-care workers — “aunties and grandmas who could wrap their love around the babies” who would reside at the facilities while their mothers received treatment.

Other questions, though, revolved around the issue of whether the facility would bring an increase in crime to the island, and how the Health Board would assist patients in leaving the island.

“I came to Vashon to get away from homeless people and drug addicts, so this is a really uncomfortable thing that you’re coming here,” said Katy Ballard, who attended the meeting via Zoom.

Ballard shared her calculation, based on the Health Board’s statistic that 61% of its patients completed its programs and its plans to serve 92 patients in a 45-day residential program, that approximately 300 patients who did not complete the program each year would “walk out of the facility.”

“How are you going to make them leave the island?” Ballard asked, adding that she was also worried about the departure of patients who did complete the program because “a lot of people who are addicts are homeless.” She was worried, she said, that those who completed the program would camp in the forests of Vashon, and start fires.

Lucero was focused in her response, painting a very different picture of the people who would seek treatment at the center — and saying in response to both Ballard’s comments and a similar question from islander Mark Thorn that the Health Board would help all patients leave the island after treatment.

“I always want to acknowledge that these are folks seeking healing and we know that if a majority of folks are going back into the world in a healthy way, that benefits all of us,” she said.

She said that the idea that people in recovery are “homeless and criminals” was a false narrative that she refused to propel.

“We need to be part of the solution,” she said. “It’s interesting because when I drive to Vashon, as beautiful as it is, I definitely see homelessness, I see substance abuse. So I’m coming here as a good community member to help you all with that too. It’s interesting because we have a whole team of providers — not just doctors, not just mental health providers, not just social workers, we have after-care specialists, we have folks who will help transport them — to make sure they can re-integrate to their own communities. Because I’ll tell you, that’s what they want. They want to go back to their babies, back to their families, they want to go back in a healthy way. They want to be part of their community. Sometimes they need a moment to get away. We set them up with jobs, we help them with work skills, we help them reconnect with their families, and make amends in those good ways.”

She also said that in the 33 years that the Health Board had previously operated its recovery center in Seattle, there had been no instances of neighborhood crime associated with the facility.

In a statement on Tuesday, Lucero again addressed what she called “a harmful narrative” presented at the meeting.

“Our responsibility to our relatives is to provide the highest quality care, rooted in compassion, evidence-based practices, and Indigenous knowledge. We cannot allow harmful, fear-based narratives to dictate our course,” she said. “Through dialogue and understanding, we hope to dismantle this harmful narrative criminalizing addiction and housing insecurity.”

Correction: In the print edition and earlier online edition of this article, the first name of Socia Love-Thurman, M.D. was misspelled. We strive for accuracy and regret the error.