For our April 12th meetup, The Urbanist is thrilled to host Marc Dones, chief executive officer of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority — the organization tasking with unifying and scale up the region’s response to the homelessness crisis. King County estimated its homeless population was more than 40,000 in 2020, and different cities have taken very different approaches to grappling with that issue.
Dones (they/them pronouns) was appointed in April 2021 to lead the new agency guiding the regional response to homelessness. Dones has experienced housing insecurity and knows the social service system from the inside, as they noted in an interview with Ashley Archibald in South Seattle Emerald.
“I don’t talk about this that often, but I’m a queer, nonbinary Black person who has significant mental health issues and also has experienced housing instability,” Dones said. “So it was also a moment where I was like, I can finally take the things that I know from my life and start making them live inside a system.”
