Building Stronger Communities: Danielle Garbe Reser, BMAC, on Housing, Food & Hope

0:00Hello everyone and welcome to the Fortell podcast. Um I'm with Danielle who's the executive director at BMACH. Hey Daniel, how are you? >> Hi Bob, I'm great. It's a pleasure to be with you today. >> Fantastic. And you've got one of the more interesting backgrounds I think of um someone who's running a community action agency. So tell us a bit about your background because I know it was you know you had some really interesting experiences in international development before you came to community action. >> Yeah. So thank you. My very uh first job out of college and grad school was joining the foreign service. So I became

0:34a US diplomat on September 10th, 2001. So it was quite a day to be joining the foreign service and standing up to serve our country. Of course 911 the big disaster was the next day. Um and so we had to evacuate our campus. And when we came back to work the next day, the world had dramatically changed. But my colleagues and I were felt so grateful to be in a position to help our country um respond and recover from that attack. And I ended up um going to Indonesia for my first assignment. So I was in Jakarta for two years and then went back to Washington DC. And I joke that I had the not so foreign service career because I

1:19was based in Washington DC for many of those years. When I finally went back overseas, I was in Beirut from 2011 to 2013, which was the start of the Syrian war. And it was a fascinating time to be overseas and responding especially to the needs of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. And um that job really helped me focus and think about how I wanted to help people and what it meant to give back in a community. I ended up coming back to the United States and uh left the foreign service in 2015 and moved back to Walaw Wala. So a town I'd gone to college in and uh was able to give back to the community by becoming the CEO of

2:02Sherwood Trust. It's a private foundation that does community and economic development and it was set up by the same family that had paid for the full ride scholarship that made my college education possible. So, a real full circle moment to come back to a smaller town and put my talents to use here on the ground in the United States. And I did that for several years before um leaving to run for office. I started my own little software company. And then in at the end of 2022, uh, the board here at Blue Mountain Action Council asked if I'd come back on an interim basis to join the Community Action Agency. And I knew it did great

2:44things in the community and was really excited to join. And it didn't take me being here very long before I thought, "Oh, wow. I would love to do this full-time." And luckily, the team and the board agreed. And so I've been here full-time since 2023. So, I've seen big global change on a world scale and also what it means to be part of positive change right in my own backyard. And it's all rewarding in different ways, but I'm loving this chapter here in Walaw Wala. >> Oh, that's fantastic. Well, Walaw Wala is my favoritely named place as you know. >> It is the best name. Um, but tell people who don't know what is Walaw Wala like?

3:22Um, obviously the Blue Mountains are beautiful, but what does BMAC do and who is the community you serve? >> Yeah. So, Blue Mountain Action Council is a community action agency that serves three counties in southeast Washington state. So, we're in the corner. Um, it's about 60,000 people in Walaw Wala County, a largely agricultural area where Walaw Wala is the biggest city and it is the town so nice they named it twice. And neighboring counties are Colombia, which has just over 4,000 people, and Garfield, which has only 2500 people. So, it's a unique um corner of the state. It's about a 4-hour drive

4:02from Walaw Wallala to either Seattle or Portland or Boise. So, we feel like we're in the center of it all. Um, but it is, as you noted, a more remote area marked by the Blue Mountains. Um, wala wala means many waters and we have the confluence of the snake and the Columbia rivers and a whole bunch of smaller rivers and tributaries run through here. These are also the traditional homelands of the Caillou, Umatillaa and Walawala people and uh a beautiful place to call home. >> Okay, that's fantastic. And tell me more about um what are the programs you've got? What do you do? Who are the people you're serving? And what are the sort of

4:42unique challenges? Yeah. So, Blue Mountain Action Council or BMAC as we say has uh we build thriving communities with food, housing, and hope. So, our big programs are first the food bank. We're the distribution hub for 14 food pantries across five counties, so a slightly bigger footprint where we do the warehouse and distributing. This is being an agricultural area. We work with a lot of partners. We have um and directly with farmers. We have a great cleaning program where volunteers go out in the fields after harvest and get any leftover produce so that we can make sure all that food is enjoyed. Um so

5:22food is a huge piece for us. Housing is uh the other big set of programs we have all the way from working with people experiencing homelessness and helping them transition to housing to running our own affordable housing programs. We have over 18 we have 18 properties um in the community and then um we have a new program that helps people get ready to buy their first home. So really thinking that everyone in our community deserves a safe place to call home and a lot of different ways to help envision that. And then the third bucket is hope because hope is powerful. It means you have a goal and a set of pathways and

6:05options for achieving it and a sense of agency that that's possible. And that's been um a new focus for us where we used to talk more specifically about jobs as our next bucket. But we realize in an aging rural population, a job isn't always that next best step for someone. So talking more broadly about what it means to bring hope to someone to help them set goals in their life which oftentimes is a job but for some others it might be improved quality of life um addressing social isolation helping advocate for rights and engagement in the community. So it's a lot of different programs that all are about

6:44meeting people who are experiencing poverty or themselves low income who want to help move towards self-sufficiency and a higher quality of life. Yeah. So, what's changed for you? So, you you've been doing the role while obviously you grew up in the area. What's changed in some of the challenges that an agency like BMAC is trying to solve right now? >> Yeah. Um, [clears throat] it is a more rural area, so we don't have as many resources as a bigger city might for addressing solutions. And I would say that's part of what we're really grappling with, not just at BMAC and the people we're serving right now,

7:20but our community as a whole. There was a big economic uptick um from the late 90s through the last couple years with growth of the wine industry that brought more jobs, the new industries, whether that was manufacturing for the wine piece or people working in wine. Um but there are a lot of headwinds in that industry now. So we're seeing more businesses close and with that there's less tourism which is another piece of our economy being so a dependent. Um there's a lot of um challenges in that sector right now with diesel prices going up, fertilizer prices going up and weather being more complicated that

8:02that's hard. So it's just there's a lot of economic challenges in our region. So at BMAC, that shows up on our front door, right? As more people in our community are struggling, we'll see, and we've started seeing more this last month, a higher need in the food bank, especially as a first place. We also see it in people needing assistance with paying their rents. And uh that's been a big area of challenge for us as rental rates have gone up pretty substantially in our region the last few years. Um, and then people who are looking for jobs, but there just might not be enough jobs in our region or enough that pay

8:40well enough that someone can really get ahead and not need our assistance. And so I would say those are kind of the buckets of things we're really watching right now. >> What um has the So you talked about housing earlier as well. So, has the homeless situation because when I've been around various different parts of Washington state, it's it's pretty intense in certain in certain places for sure. Has that um increased? [clears throat] Has homelessness increased within sort of Walaw Wala and the counties you're serving to? >> We continue to see it as a issue in our area and we've had some really good

9:17success in tackling some aspects of it, but it's not solved. And um there's a great resource that talks about homelessness as a housing problem. And if we're not building enough housing, you're just going to keep experiencing homelessness. And the data really shows that it's it's not mental health, it's not drug use, it's not weather, it's not all the other things we think about related to homelessness. It's you need enough housing right at rates that people can afford to >> people can afford. >> So we have not seen sufficient growth in housing here. So that is a key issue. But where we've seen success is that and

9:54an advantage of being in a slightly smaller area is we really know our community partners and people have rallied around some great initiatives. One was called the anchor community initiative that address youth homelessness. Really building a system as the team describes as yes to yes. So at the time a youth or a young adult might be experiencing homelessness and comes in asking for help, we can get them housed and get them connected to services so that that experience is brief and short and does not repeat. Um we also run a veterans program over a bigger area and um the team at BMAC, we're super proud of them, won the

10:34Washington State Veterans Department award for excellent teamwork and service to veterans. They've done amazing work to help get veterans housed and there are different resources and rules around veterans. So, we're able to connect somebody who might be living on the street and get them connected to a HUD bash voucher. So, we really get them into a long-term sustainable and stable housing situation much more quickly. So, some pockets doing well, somewhere. We still continue to experience it and continue to have challenges as more people um get displaced by costs or a medical emergency or other issues. We

11:15haven't >> totally solved it yet. >> No, I imagine that. And do you so one of the things I was talking about with someone on Tennessee which is really focused on that's my daughter shouting. Um so one of the things we were talking about in Tennessee is essentially this idea of exactly what you're describing. So housing housing basically not being plentiful enough therefore rising. They've got this problem because Nashville and the Environs around Nashville essentially are really like booming and therefore the the rents that people were being able to pay sort of 5 10 years ago are totally totally at odds

11:57with what people are earning. I because I sort of because when I came to Wal quite small, right? It has the best airport ever. Um but uh but is that is that a little bit different because obviously the people we're talking to at Tennessee they have they are serving rural communities too but it's you know I suppose you're quite away from a mega city like Nashville. So what is the dynamic there? >> Yeah. So really for us um the tourism market dramatically affected housing. So, a lot of people bought second homes here just as their vacation home or to convert them into rental or like an Airbnb or VBO property. Um, and that

12:44really like tracked with the growth of the wine industry. But even just a small example would be um I knew of a two-bedroom apartment uh that when I got here in 2015 when I moved back to town was $500. That same apartment is, you know, $1,250 now. So more than doubled. And that's the challenge, right? Wages have not more than doubled in the last decade. And um so we see very similar challenges to big cities in terms of the pressures on rents and similar Nashville being a tourist area. It's the same kind of thing. >> Yeah. Sure. Sure. And what about from your perspective because obviously you know you've got you've got a team at

13:30BMAC, right? And what is the sort of funding situation for you guys? I know COVID was a a weird bump where you know there was a lot more dollars around especially for things like eviction prevention. What how how is it now in terms of both funding for programs and funding for running those programs? >> Yeah. So definitely we've had a lot of changes in the last few years as you noted when I came in we were just at the tail end of COVID funding and then kind of things normalized in 24 then 25 as there have been significant disruptions in federal programming and funding but we've had some changes at Washington

14:08state too. Our state has been running budget deficits and they've tried really hard not to um cut programs that help our most vulnerable Washingtonians, but there have been some changes. Some of our programs went away. So last year we lost about a million dollars in revenue altogether out of about an $18 million budget. So it >> yeah, >> we managed to absorb it. Um, and we've been working to diversify what we're doing and who we're partnering with. We've working more with healthcare authorities um, and just finding other funding streams. Amazingly, our community has been awesome and that's been a huge help to us. Historically,

14:51BMAC's just been able to manage our needs through grants and a little bit of donation. But last year when food was cut back pretty significantly, we lost about half a million dollars in food contracts federally like overnight last March. And we brought our community together and said like this is the really challenging situation we're facing. What ideas do you have for how we can help make sure our community gets fed? And that community meeting led to two big efforts. One was um what we called the friends of the BMAC food bank campaign where we set up just small dollar monthly donations with the goal

15:35of having more predictable revenue to support the food bank in particular since people need food every single day. And that really grew our base of donors and and we want anybody no matter their income to be able to donate to us, right? So, if it's $5 a month, that's meaningful to us and can help buy a meal for a family. Um, the other thing we worked on was really bringing more food and produce into the food bank and that led to the gleaning program where community volunteers are helping us uh go out to home gardens around here. Tomatoes and zucchinis are really plentiful in the summer months and a lot

16:18of it will go to waste and we're like, you know, let us pick it before you your zucchini gets too large. We'll get them on other people's plates so you don't have to eat zucchini every day or people who are aging might have fruit trees in their backyards and we're able to send volunteers to collect those apricots so again they don't just rot on the ground. So last summer that program brought in 15,000 pounds of food which was a huge um you know great improvement in what we're able to do and we're excited this year. We have a new gleaning team coordinator starting next week who will help us expand our partnerships and our

16:57community to get more people aware of the fact that they can uh volunteer their own produce from their backyard or they can volunteer to help us pick it up. Um, and we're started a grow a row program to encourage people to dedicate a row of their home garden to growing produce for the BMAC food bank. >> No, that's really cool. It's really cool that you've engaged all those people that and that you you're taking produce that they don't need as well, which is it's a really nice thing. And last question, what's you know, because your job's pretty hard, let's be honest about it. What's your favorite bit of it?

17:33>> I actually like that the job is really hard. So, I happen to like challenges and I like doing difficult things that do good for our community and we do lots of different things. So, no day is the same and there's a chance to work with really awesome people on a really important mission to make a difference. And I loved that sense of mission that I had in the foreign service of serving our country. And I get that same sense of satisfaction that our efforts make a real difference here in our community now through BMEch. Oh, that's really nice. Well, Daniel, thanks so much for being on the podcast. We really

18:14appreciate it. >> Thank you, Rob, for having me. Have a great day.