Our Work
Survival Projects
We feed people six days a week, provide jail and street outreach, offer showers and hygiene supplies, and provide harm reduction support.
“Projects of survival” are more than a handout to people in need—they are a way of regularly gathering struggling people together to meet immediate needs, as well as to build relationships and strategize and organize around issues of injustice. At COH, we know that the people with the greatest insights and leadership to offer on poverty, homelessness, and incarceration are the people who have lived through those things themselves. Projects of survival are a way of gathering those directly impacted leaders together.
We feed people six days a week, provide jail and street outreach, offer showers and hygiene supplies, and provide harm reduction support.
We support and pastor people who are experiencing the man-made crisis and disaster of poverty—while also working toward a world where there is no more poverty.
Chaplaincy
Our chaplaincy sometimes looks like praying with people (in whatever faith or spiritual path they follow). Other times it looks like supporting people as they navigate the criminal justice system, sharing meals together, or visiting people in jail and in encampments. We do not proselytize. We are simply present, and honored to bear witness to the courage and endurance with which people face this world.
Leadership Development
We look to support leadership among the people who are struggling most in this county—people who have been locked up, thrown out, and often forgotten by those in power.
We also provide staff leadership opportunities for a core group of people in our base who have managed to work through some of their own healing and stabilize. In a community with limited resources and a lot of instability, supportive employment is a game-changer in building the long-term leadership of directly-impacted people.
We truly believe that everyone can be a leader on some level, no matter where they are at.
We believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation ever to exist.
Advocacy
We have sent staff leaders to represent us in North Carolina with Raise Up! Fight for $15, to Washington DC with the Poor People’s Campaign, and Mississippi to partner with local human rights groups working on cooperative farming, prisoners rights, and poverty abolition.
Harbor Roots Farm
Montesano, WA 98563
Harbor Roots is a 3-acre vegetable farm and project of Chaplains on the Harbor, a poor people’s organization in Grays Harbor County, WA. When the timber economy collapsed, the region was left with very few jobs and little hope. In a place where 1 out of 25 are homeless, we’ve weathered every storm since, and are now reclaiming our right to fresh food, to sustainable use of the land, and to an economy that benefits all of us, not just the few at the top. We are restoring the land and its people.
Harbor Roots Farm
52 Arland Rd
Montesano, WA 98563
We expect that we will develop into a hub of co-op projects by and for people affected by poverty in Grays Harbor.
Co-ops and Enterprises
We aim to become a major employer in Grays Harbor County, growing good food, creating a cafe, and creating small businesses that benefit the community, while hiring and supporting the people who have been left out of our social structure. Workers will provide the collective direction for the organizations.
Harbor Eats Food Truck
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.