Seventeen years ago, Wendy Cisneros found herself alone and scared in an unfamiliar city. Recently separated from her husband, she was suddenly on her own with a baby boy to look after and no idea where they would sleep or how they would eat. “I didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. “I didn’t know that there were resources for housing, for food, so I was navigating it all on my own. It was really intense.” 

Much has changed since those terrifying first months. Today, Wendy’s baby boy is a young adult studying at North Seattle College. And Wendy herself is a medical assistant at a public health clinic in downtown Seattle, where she uses her firsthand experiences with poverty and homelessness to support others in similar situations.

She’s also one of the newest Solid Ground Board of Directors members, helping to shape our work and future with the wisdom and insight you can only get by living through the reality of poverty.

Wendy is now the third person to join the board after serving on Solid Ground’s Community Accountability Council (CAC), a group of community members with lived experience with poverty formed in 2019 to hold Solid Ground accountable to our mission and assure we continue to meet needs identified by the people we serve.

This includes our Board Chair, Mary Ruffin, who once lived in Solid Ground’s Sand Point Housing and first joined the CAC to make sure the agency does right by its residents.

‘What I went through’

Wendy has a saying: “Everyone’s experience with poverty is different.” Hers started in 2006, when she first moved to the Seattle area with her then-husband, a U.S. Marine she’d met while he was serving in El Salvador. She arrived with dreams of starting a family with her husband and a career as a lawyer.

But Wendy’s new chapter got off to a rough start. She quickly learned that her law school credits didn’t transfer in the U.S., and then she became pregnant, so school was no longer an option. At times, she and her husband had to live in their car as they tried to get their footing. And then their relationship began to fall apart. “There was a point where I was going to be in a shelter with my baby,” she says. “But I didn’t even want to call. It just felt so defeating, to come here to the United States and to think I could potentially be in a shelter and out of food.”

With nowhere to turn for help, Wendy did the only thing she knew to do: work as hard as possible. Eventually, she put in so many hours at a mall shoe store in Bellevue that she was able to afford a place for herself and her son.

Wendy later got into the medical field and has worked for a number of large providers –
including a stint at a COVID-19 testing site. But she found that her true passion was public health, where she can use her own experience to help patients connect with resources beyond medicine, like food, housing, and other essentials – including those available through Solid Ground. “I have my own resource now that I’m sharing with other people, so they don’t have to worry about going through what I went through,” she says. “It’s just a nice feeling.”

‘Not just in words’

Wendy first learned of Solid Ground around 2015, when her mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and applied for an apartment in Solid Ground’s Sand Point Housing. She was impressed with the activities held on campus for residents and the help staff provided, connecting her family with food banks and other resources.

But Wendy didn’t get involved with Solid Ground herself until several years later, when she volunteered to work on a city taskforce in Seattle and met Tiffany Lamoreaux, Solid Ground’s Anti-Racism Initiative Manager.

    “Most of the time … boards are created by and for people with some kind of positionality – people with a bunch of letters after their names. … But at the same time, people like that usually haven’t experienced what it is to be in a certain level of poverty.”

    So the Community Accountability Council’s role is to say, “‘Actually, that’s not the reality of what poverty is like, what not having a home is, what not eating is.’ And then just put it all out on the table and explain it.”

~Wendy Cisneros, Solid Ground Board Member

Wendy’s experience on that taskforce left her feeling even more marginalized and used – like her participation was only performative, and her voice wasn’t actually being heard. “We worked in that group for a little more than a year and a half, and to this day we don’t know what happened to the document we produced,” Wendy says. So when Tiffany said she was starting a new group at Solid Ground that would give community members real, meaningful decision-making power, Wendy was interested.

“Most of the time, these boards are created by and for people with some kind of positionality – people with a bunch of letters after their names, a bachelors or masters or whatever,” Wendy says. “But at the same time, people like that usually haven’t experienced what it is to be in a certain level of poverty. They’re only seeing it through a textbook, or what they’ve learned in school. So we’re there to be like, ‘Actually, that’s not the reality of what poverty is like, what not having a home is, what not eating is.’ And then just put it all out on the table and explain it.”

In the last six years, Tiffany has made good on Solid Ground’s promise to make the CAC an integral part of agency leadership. The CAC now reviews all candidates for the board, and votes on those who bring experiences with poverty and homelessness to the position. Solid Ground staff regularly come to the CAC with questions about designing and implementing programs, and the CAC routinely pushes for changes within the agency – like providing stipends for low-income board members to make it possible for more people to serve.

“To me, it says that Solid Ground is committed to the work of anti-racism – not just in words, but in action,” Tiffany says. “Right now, we’re watching as a lot of groups across the country are walking away from commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we’re not doing that. That’s something we can be proud of.”

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Image at top: Solid Ground board member Wendy Cisneros (in pink) celebrates community at our 50th Anniversary Gala in May 2024 (photo by Michael B. Maine).