GUIDING DOCUMENTs
Waters Meet is committed to constant evolution & reevaluation of our role alongside community.
10-Year Strategic Direction (2025-2034)
Adopted by the Waters Meet Board in May 2024, this document represents the culmination of a multi-year process of listening to and learning from community. Our partners have asked us to show up as a stronger partner and focus our resources in the communities most impacted by persistent health inequities.
As a foundation we are shifting our resources to focus on building community power in BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, disability, rural, and low-income communities. This shift is guided by data on health inequity, the lived experience of our partners, and the experiences of like-minded philanthropies who have improved health outcomes by focusing on community power building. We hope that you see your work and our future partnership reflected in this strategic direction.
Equity Healing Framework (2022)
Adopted in 2022, the Equity Healing Framework grows out of what Waters Meet has learned from our past work and from our community partners — that the role of philanthropy is not to solve; it is to support; to ensure communities have ongoing resources for healing.
That support means recognizing, learning from, and amplifying the expertise and lived experience within those communities. It means working in ways that are community-focused rather than issues focused. It means approaching BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, and economically disadvantaged/rural communities with curiosity and humility and working in partnership with community leaders and organizations to co-create conditions for healing.
REPORTS
We remain dedicated to listening, learning, and evolving in partnership with communities.
Impact Report 2024-2025
Since the inauguration of our Equity Healing Framework in 2022, our organization has been committed to trying something different — letting community leadership shape our initiatives from the beginning. In 2024 and 2025, that structural shift affected how we decide what to fund, how we think about risk, what success looks like, and who gets to make the call when trade-offs are hard.
Our 2024-2025 Impact Report, “Evolving with Community,” aims to capture some of these changes. The past two years saw the launch of our flagship grantmaking initiative, Building Connections. Additionally, we made the first steps towards a tiny home project for Spokane, facilitated the Community Reinvestment Project for our area, and made important progress in building community power in alignment with our 501(c)4 advocacy and organizing arm, Waters Meet Action Fund.
Housing Navigation Center (HNC) and Specialized Shelter Report
From October 2024 to September 2025, Waters Meet served as the system operator of the pilot housing navigation center and specialized shelter system under contract with the City of Spokane. In this role, Waters Meet was tasked with overseeing contracting with the service providers operating shelters, as well as identifying and facilitating the opening of new shelters in coordination with property owners and service providers.
Waters Meet has prepared this report to share what we have learned in this role. We believe these insights are important to consider in the context of the more holistic changes that are currently being implemented and considered across the housing and homeless services system in our community.
Roanhorse Report (2023)
In 2023, we partnered with Roanhorse Consulting, an Indigenous-led firm, to co-develop an equitable evaluation model that honors the principles of the Equity Healing Framework. Grounded in Indigenous knowledge, Roanhorse’s evaluation framework asked what people know, see, and feel. In doing so, their questions prioritized and centered the lived experiences of community partners—capturing rich feedback from multiple perspectives.
We are fully committed to this journey of becoming a more equitable and community-guided organization. The feedback gathered through this process has been invaluable as we move beyond nice words on a page to grounding our Equity Healing Framework in tangible action. We invite everyone to read the full report of Roanhorse’s findings linked above.
