Typically, founders write a bio that occupies the place of a CV in the window to the inward looking public. That document has its place. I have chosen to write to you as friends in a manner that is frank and fits the ask I am making of you to support a legacy project. You have an expectation to understand the genesis of this college project along with the standards and details that are at work building it. You have right to know a bit more about the water carrier in the engine room of this project, and why this community project is worthy of your support.
I want to introduce you to the relevant parts of my background that have brought this project to life. What matters about my personal story is that I have a back ground made up of racial curvature. I am a native of Ghana born in Accra to Edna and Christopher. I have 3 siblings I spent my early years with in the 1970’s. Our parents divorced and in time our father remarried and immigrated to the United States in 1981 bringing me along. With my first decade of life under me as a middle class Ghanaian boy in the African context, I departed everything I knew, from the red soil of Osu to my family and made the plane journey to America.
Looking back, I took for granted the elements and traits that my strong maternal family and grandfather instilled in me in Ghana, a way of seeing ourselves as stewards of the community we are a part of. The notion that we are each individually responsible for the collective gain of the community. That we prosper as an enhanced kind of citizen if we contribute our lot towards improving the society for all of us. Perhaps the political instability of successive military coups, coupled with the influence of a civil service family firmly imprinted these and other values at that early age as I took on and begun an immigrants life in America.
My teens were spent primarily as a domestic for a Ghanaian family needing a house boy in helping to raise their three boys in California. My father's marriage had failed within a year. His pride would not let him send me back to my mother, and I was not going to make a fuss about my circumstances. Culture intervened and he placed with an Immigrant Ghanaian family in need of a handy all round house boy in exchange for putting me through a public high school. The arrangement served the larger needs of the situation and we all adapted.
Three years in America and I was beginning to find within myself, the work ethic and grit I had observed within my family members as a boy during the coup years. My first job was at fourteen. It was a graveyard job, populated by a hard pit boss, immigrant labor, and the occasional college student. It was piece work, two weeks of work got me a check for $74. Which I unwillingly, but immediately turned over to the household kettle… still choosing not to making waves and not knowing where my passport was. I had little contact until I was 26 with my family. I find work in the retail building industry. Started small and worked my way up. College was not to be in me future even though I tried it. Life and a job took priority. It was the time of the Rodney King beating and riots around Los Angeles. Although I did not care for the weather in southern California, I learned a great deal about how business works, how projects get built and financed, how the code works and why we have organized our construction industry as we have.
I arrived on my 30th birthday in Seattle, WA after having spent the previous 5 years building structures across the United States. I had made the decision to settle in the Pacific northwest and set about to do something different. Housing and specifically, affordable housing became an interest of mine. Simultaneously I had the privilege to serve as a planning commissioner for a young city on a fast growth trajectory. I never knew I could read so much. I added the understanding of urban planning, community development, finance, land use planning, and the non profit sector to my skill set.
Feeling secure and confident in the opportunities ahead, I left my job and started a small real estate development and project management firm. Community development, the early adoption of analytics to help make key investment decisions, prototype project development, and a range of subject area specialties that came with each new project. My learning curve was step and I begun to see blind spots in the social and business sectors around me. I saw issues of deferred maintenance in housing. I saw the impacts of redlining in the projects I took on and realized the structural restrictions to actually bringing the benefits of any housing project to the occupants. As my thinking cleared up and some solutions begun to take shape in the type of projects we would take on going forward, the recession of 2008 degraded the opportunities and I made the difficult decision to close my firm.
10 years ago (Oct 2010) an event occurred that caused a major disruption to my life. A lost and frustrated man attacked me for no known reason with a machete and a knife. It was a hate crime whose details and impact on my life I continue to try to sort out. After the incident, regaining my physical and mental fitness became impossible at the home where I had been attacked. I needed a change of scenery to find my focus and to recenter myself. On what I did not know, but I had a desire to go home to Ghana. To find my family ties I left at 11 and after 30 years. My existence seemed a failure. The recession of 07/08 had wiped out my small construction management firm. Going back to Ghana was not an option as I had no support system to tie up my affairs here in the United States.
During my convalescence immediately after the incident and after leaving the hospital, I sought to find a place I could spend some time alone to think. I came across a place called Cama beach. It was situated on the Puget Sound on Historic native land and built in 1934 by the LeRoy Stradley. They had cabins for rent and so I rented one and stayed a bit. Painful as those days were as I relentlessly pushed my body to its then limits, unable to trust my minds instincts, and paranoid about every bushy haired white man I would see, the idea of the farm and technical college begun to gather.
On those walks, I began to wonder what kind of a place or set of circumstances would produce someone like the fellow who tried to killed me. The more I rolled it around the more my focus shifted to why he had not simply reached out to me if he had an issue. Why was the first time I heard from him the day he had a moment of madness. We will never know will we?
The next best thing was to digest the pivot my life had taken. What was next, I could not go back to the place I had previously called home. I needed to find mental space and a bit of isolation to sort out how I felt about what had happened and my intense emotions around it. In the preceding weeks I had searched for a place to go to collect myself. I discovered there were very few places one could go to get help in the aftermath of a hate crime especially if you were black.
I thought then about the place I stood, Cama Beach and realized that folks from the black community and other undeserved communities needed a place they could go to recover form hate crimes and the traumas so many endure because society was not design for our life experience.
What I possessed was a thinkers mind, a desire to return to my roots, the land, and a drive to create a place that can help redirect the energy many of us retain within our instincts from traumatic experiences. desire to reset as I was out of sorts. Over the next two years while I attempted to recover, I thought out a rough sequential plan to leave the City, find a suitable property somewhere between the major black community population centers here in the Pacific Northwest to develop and build a place that would heal because of its setting and at the same time lend itself to being a natural laboratory for learning. I wanted to bring people together to enjoy good food and to learn about each others inherited norms.