Anything Helps News Today

SEATTLE — When the volunteer-run organization Anything Helps, headed by a man who said he could do homeless encampment outreach better, approached Seattle Public Schools this summer and offered to end an encampment outside Broadview-Thompson K-12, the school district agreed.

The man tasked with clearing a Seattle homeless camp asked an addict to "slam" him with meth, and his organization was barely vetted.

The nonprofit leader entrusted to clear the dangerous encampment at Broadview-Thomson K-8 admits that he took meth with a homeless woman he was supposed to help.

After months of delays, Seattle Public Schools has now established a timeline for the removal of a Bitter Lake homeless encampment. 

Seattle Public Schools said Monday that the district hopes to have everyone who’s currently staying an encampment on the shores of Bitter Lake — situated between a school playground and a park playfield — into shelter or housing by mid-December.

The intrusion, such that it was, didn’t seem to bother the man all that much. He’d been standing for hours on a bare, sodden patch of earth on Hanes Mall Boulevard holding a sign silently appealing to the generosity of strangers. Passersby, a lot of them, look the other way or act as if he doesn’t exist. So a question, posed by another stranger who’d approached out of the clear blue sky, wasn’t about to ruffle him. Besides, he’s heard worse. “People have sp...