Our Story
Chaplains on the Harbor is rooted in Grays Harbor County. Grays Harbor County has twice the opioid overdose death rate as the rest of Washington State. Grays Harbor County incarcerates children for nonviolent noncriminal offenses at a higher rate than any county in the nation. 46% of the county is on public assistance. Our roughly 500-person base at Chaplains on the Harbor is mostly young, and on average one of our members dies each month from preventable, poverty-related causes: from lack of health care, from police brutality, from exposure, from overdose.
What we do much of the time is slow, quiet work: feeding people, making jail visits, hosting cold weather shelters, checking in on homeless encampments, and teaching. However, we know we need long-term solutions to poverty, as important as it is to do the daily work of helping people survive.
Our Work
Through Harbor Roots Farm, we are launching a farming apprenticeship for our young members getting out of jail and off the streets, to sell food that generates income for them, as well as to create surplus food for local hungry people. This is, we hope, the opposite of the extraction economics that profited from the resources and labor of Grays Harbor County, without adequately providing for the loggers and fishers who built the wealth of those industries.
We have also joined the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This campaign has brought us into relationship with other struggling communities scattered across the country—from Flint to Ferguson to Philly. We’ve joined this campaign because, at Chaplains on the Harbor, we are not only looking to survive. We are also raising up poor rural leaders who are willing to stand with others to fight for a better world.
Our farm apprenticeship program will not just be a jobs program; it will help generate some stability for a core group of young people to organize for real change in this county and beyond. In addition to their farm hours, our apprentices will anchor our "School of Hard Knocks" - a weekly political education and training program for people experiencing poverty.
We know that one farm won’t fix things around here, but it is the seed of change we need to rebuild the economy from the ground up.
Join us!
We are raising $25,000 to launch us into the 2018 growing season. Foundation money largely gets concentrated in urban centers, so grassroots donations are the lifeblood of our work - we can't do this without you!
A generous local farmer is leasing us 3 acres of land, and we are finding used and donated equipment where we can, but we still have some significant expenses.
Your donations will directly contribute to...
- Living wages for our apprentices
- Wrap-around services for our apprentices and community members
- Irrigation equipment
- Seeds
- Soil amendments
All of this will lay the foundation for us to show that vibrant and sustainable solutions to poverty are possible in this region.