With a new leader, will Tacoma Rescue Mission adapt with the times? Let's hope.

Tacoma and Pierce County are in the midst of a homelessness crisis. On the front lines are organizations like Tacoma Rescue Mission, which for the last century has provided a safety net and stop gap for the most vulnerable among us.

It's not hard to make the argument that the Rescue Mission is one of the most important players in town when it comes to providing shelter, resources and hope to the individuals and families experiencing homelessness.

This week, the Rescue Mission named a new executive director, Duke Paulson, a 46-year-old Pacific Lutheran University grad with a long history working in the field. Next month, Paulson will take over for departed executive director Mike Johnson, who left the Rescue Mission in October 2017.

We should all wish Paulson luck. He's got work to do.

Because we all have work to do.

Given the seriousness of the crisis at hand, here are a few questions worth posing to the Rescue Mission's new leader as it works on its second century of service:

Faced with the city's and county’s homeless crisis, will the Tacoma Rescue Mission be willing and able to adapt with the times?

While maintaining its role in providing crucial emergency shelter services, will the organization also be open to better partnering with entities throughout the county that have more thoroughly embraced the coordinated response system built around the housing-first model?

Let’s hope. Because it could go a very long way.

The significance of the critical task Paulson is about to undertake — one he described this week as “a dream job” — is not lost on him. Before his first day at work even commenced, he sounded open to both listening and increasing community collaboration — describing both objectives as a priority for him.

Paulson seemed to know what he needs to do to be successful.

“Part of this, for me right now, is saying I want to listen and try to activate and learn as much as possible,” Paulson said. “How can we be part of the solution? I believe there’s an opportunity to do that and to collaborate with lots of different groups.”

In addition to maintaining and growing the Rescue Mission’s longstanding emergency shelter services, the new executive director listed two other worthy goals. Paulson hopes to oversee an increase in services for homeless families, specifically so we can “get kids out of the cycle,” and also create what he described as “better pathways out of poverty” — like job training and educational opportunities.

In some ways, Paulson's new job is a calling he said he has long been preparing for. After growing up in what he called a “middle-class home in Portland, Oregon,” he acknowledged that, prior to moving to Hilltop in the early 1990s, he had never lived in an area where poverty was a constant.

He’d been planning to go to medical school, but those plans changed.

“About midway through the year my eyes got opened,” Paulson said of his first formative experience living on Hilltop in a house where he and his roommates converted the garage into a tutoring lab and there was a bustling drug business across the street.

“I had a spiritual moment, like, ‘Well, God, you’re showing me something that I had been driving by and walking by but had never paid attention to,’” Paulson recalled.

“It actually brought me to tears. I never went on to med school.”

The experience, Paulson said, forever changed him. Eventually, it led him down a career path that’s included work for social service providers like Puyallup’s Helping Hand House, where he served as executive director, and Tacoma’s Metropolitan Development Council, where he served as vice president.

According to Mike Yoder, executive director of Associated Ministries, Paulson’s previous work and life experiences should serve him well.

“Duke is well known to many of us in Pierce County’s human services scene,” Yoder said.

“I trust that The Rescue Mission’s decision to choose a new leader who has a long track record of living and serving this community bodes well for the organization’s next season, one in which they’ll continue to embrace the role they can uniquely play in strengthening our community’s response to homelessness.”

While the challenge addressing homelessness obviously doesn’t fall on Tacoma Rescue Mission alone, the clear opportunity for the agency to do more and work more closely with others is hard to ignore, even though the organization increased the number of clients it serves by 30-percent last year

To do so, the Rescue Mission, under Paulson’s lead, would be wise to at least consider increasing its flexibility and not be so rigid in its strict adherence to an old-school transitional housing model. While successful in many cases and clearly not worth scraping entirely, the transitional housing model relies on a sort of middle step before participants become eligible for permanent housing.

Sometimes, that doesn’t work. There’s a reason the transitional housing model has largely been supplanted, in Pierce County and throughout the United States, by the housing-first model. Housing first looks to rapidly offer permanent housing before working to address other obstacles like addiction or behavioral health issues.

There's a place for both, in other words, which is also a fact Paulson seemed clearly aware of.

"I think there's a middle ground," Paulson said. "Where we can collaborate do do things together, absolutely I want to do that."

"I’m a fan of change. If you're not changing, I think you’re in trouble. So we're were going to continue to grow and change," he continued. "I don’t want to lose the heart of what we do, but I do want to be open to how we can best serve the community, and a lot of the time that’s together with other organizations."

Yoder believes Paulson can help “create new momentum” for Tacoma Rescue Mission.

Again, let’s hope. Because it could go a long way.

This story was originally published March 22, 2018 at 8:00 AM with the headline "With a new leader, will Tacoma Rescue Mission adapt with the times? Let's hope.."