American Indian Community Center seeks home
By Mary Stamp
The American Indian Community Center (AICC) has found a permanent location at Riverside Ave. and A St., near People's Park, after moving 12 times since it started in 1967 as a social gathering place for urban Indians.
At its new location, it will continue to offer social and economic services, family assistance and cultural programs.
The AICC programs serve about 10,000 urban Indians from 300 tribes who live in Spokane and in off-reservation communities in 21 counties of Eastern Washington and North Idaho.
While the figures add up to 2.4 percent of the population, Linda Lauch, executive director, said many more urban Indians have lost ties with their tribes because of boarding school trauma, relocations and intermarriage.
Linda, for example, describes herself as "a descendant of the Spokane Tribe." She was born in Wellpinit but grew up in Spokane, graduated from Rogers High School in 1980 and studied accounting at Spokane Community College.
She began as a receptionist at the AICC in 1985 and learned the center's scope by working with its programs, personnel and records. In 2019, she became executive director.
AICC, which is currently housed at 1025 W. Indiana in the Spokane Tribe Building, has been looking for years for a home of its own with space it will not outgrow. With the assistance of the AICC's campaign chair, Karen Stratton, a former Spokane City Council member, it has raised just more than $2 million of the $16 million needed to build the new center.
In 2022, Garrett Jones, then director of the Spokane City Parks Department, told the Parks Board the AICC story, and the board voted unanimously to lease the land to them, said Linda.
That year, the state of Washington granted funds for the AICC's Forever Home Project, a 25,000-square-foot facility designed by a Native American company in Portland.
Now that they have that design, they have been telling their story to raise funds and pledges from foundations, businesses, service clubs, churches and retirement centers.
The Spokane Alliance Truth and Reconciliation Team is also helping them raise funds.
Linda gave an overview of the programs AICC offers to everyone under its mission to provide social and economic development for all racial groups. Its programs encourage individual and family self-sufficiency and aim to protect and preserve the culture and traditions of Indian people.
About 54 percent of the 3,200 clients it assists each year are American Indian/Alaska Native, 20 percent are white, 16 percent are Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 8 percent are African American and 3 percent are Hispanic.
AICC's 19 staff members manage its programs that provide employment and training services, Indian Child Welfare, Working Families Tax Credit, rental assistance and a food bank. Cultural programs include healthcare access, drug and alcohol assessments, Goodheart Behavioral Health and crisis intervention through the Family Services program.
Linda described the programs.
• To eliminate artificial barriers to success for employment and training, one program uses Tribal Set-Aside Funds from the Department of Labor Work Force Innovation Opportunity Act. Through it, they may provide glasses for a truck driver in training, steel-toed boots and safety apparel for a construction worker or funds for books for a first-year college student.
• Through Indian Child Welfare, which AICC became involved with in the 1990s, four staff members work with families who have a child in the Child Protective Services (CPS) system, to provide parenting classes or one-to-one instruction to understand the state processes. They assisted 175 in 2024.
"We may buy a bed for a family preparing to receive back a child who was taken as a baby," said Linda. "We determine immediate needs and anticipate the next needs."
The AICC works with the local Tribal ICW programs to recruit and license Indian foster homes and kinship homes—like homes of grandparents—so if CPS takes a child, the child can be placed with family or in an Indian foster home.
"We also find Indian grandparents who are raising their grandchildren without help and offer help," she said.
• AICC has done outreach in Eastern Washington for the Working Families Tax Credits. At rural food banks, AICC hired tax professionals to help people fill out their tax returns and apply for the tax credit.
"In Omak, one woman found that after she filed a tax return, she received $11,000 in tax refunds at no cost to her," said Linda. "Tax credits are for low-income families with young children. If the state continues the program, we will continue to do outreach. We did 14 tax events at food banks this year."
• During the pandemic, AICC began helping the State Department of Commerce distribute funds from the American Residential Placement Act (ARPA) for rental assistance.
"Through those programs, eight of our staff helped 1,800 families stay in housing and arranged for other agencies to provide ARPA rental assistance," said Linda, noting that, unfortunately, when the rental support and moratorium on evictions ended after the pandemic, many were evicted.
"During the pandemic, we had funds for rental assistance along with other agencies, including SNAP and The NATIVE Project. We negotiated with landlords not to raise rents and helped families find resources," said Linda.
• AICC's food bank, an outlet of Second Harvest, is open Tuesdays to Fridays and serves anyone.
Because people can come to the food bank only once a month, AICC staff also pick up grocery rescue items at Rosauer's in Browne's Addition, Fred Meyer on Freya and the Chef's Store—bread and produce—and set items along the walkway outside the food bank on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for anyone to take any time.
Linda sees more need as pandemic food stamp funds have been cut.
"If we could stock the shelves every day, we could give out food every day," she said. "We serve 7,000 a year."
Linda is impressed that people care. Farmers donate food, like frozen ground bison or ground beef. In the summer, people plant extra produce as part of the food bank's Plant-a-Row-for-the-Needy program.
• Family Services is a catch-all for many other needs—helping with energy bills to prevent shut-offs, funds for auto repairs or requests that do not fit in other programs.
"Our care coordinators try to locate funding. We use contacts in Spokane and on neighboring reservations to do miracles that help with unusual needs, like buying a tank of gas and a card for the return trip for a family needing to go to a funeral on the Blackfeet Reservation," Linda said.
The AICC has other pots of money for rent assistance and other needs. Its Concrete Goods Fund helped a third grader go to summer basketball camp.
• Partner agencies see their clients at the AICC, helping people apply for cash or food assistance, or receive referrals.
"No one has enough resources, so we share our resources," Linda explained.
For example, while working at a booth at an event, AICC directed a woman needing $700 in energy assistance to SNAP. The SNAP representative offered to do an energy inspection of her home, resulting in replacing four windows and installing insulation and a new furnace.
• Another AICC program funds training for community health workers to help people do Medicaid applications and to do case management to help adults at risk of evictions access housing resources, rental assistance and medical care to ensure continuity of treatment for those with conditions like diabetes and depression.
• AICC's Goodheart Behavioral Health Program offers outpatient and intensive patient care for substance use disorder and mental health treatment.
"We are looking for a new co-occurring disorder counselor/supervisor and seeking grants for care coordinators and community health workers," she said.
"After 40 years of working at the American Indian Community Center, I have practiced what my dad did when he ran a paint and body shop for many years in Spokane. He taught me to help people and treat them with respect. If we help people, they will never forget it," Linda asserted.
So, Linda encourages AICC staff to work selflessly with compassion and to "go the extra mile."
"We are here to help people. That's the way Indian people are raised. We're a village," she said.
