"Aurora Motels" @ the Green Bean

This month, Awake Church is partnering with the Green Bean Coffeehouse to raise awareness about the situation of families who call Aurora motels “home”, to raise money (from a portion of the tips) to provide housing assistance to these families , and most significantly, to give these families an opportunity to tell you their stories.

It is our hope that this simple, yet stirring display will help fill in the answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”

So come check out the “Aurora Motels” photography and display at the Green Bean Coffeehouse in Greenwood (210 N. 85th St.) during the month of December.

For more information, please read the “Aurora Motels” description below, written by Jay Stringer and Heather Smith, members of the Awake community who brilliantly and with great kindness facilitated this endeavor for our Aurora neighbors.

This Christmas season, we invite you to get to know the stories of some of your neighbors. They don’t live in Greenwood, Ballard, or Greenlake. They live in the motels scattered throughout the Aurora corridor. They aren’t drug dealers or women involved in prostitution. They are families who shop in your grocery stores, attend your children’s schools, walk to your libraries, share your concern about the economy, and believe it or not, may have called their motel “home” for almost three decades.

This December, the Green Bean, in partnership with Awake church has selected five families to be blessed from the generosity of your tips. These five families are beautifully unique and yet strikingly paradigmatic of your neighbors who live in Aurora motels. A few of these families hope each month that the city of Seattle will select them for low-income housing, and at the same time, are filled with anxiety that they may not have enough money to afford first and last month’s rent to qualify. They are neighbors who have fled other states from domestic violence, work several minimum wage jobs to pay their rent, and have had photo albums of their children destroyed or abandoned. And still others use these motels for a temporary respite from another cold, damp night of homelessness.

Proceeds from your tips will be used for a two-fold purpose. First, to build a financial reserve to assist families in providing first and last month’s rent when they are chosen for low-income housing. Secondly, tips will be used to give cameras to families in order that they might preserve memory, and therefore, be spurred on to hope.

As you drink your coffee, we invite you to take some time to look at the photography (taken exclusively by Aurora children, mothers & fathers), gain a new perspective from the audio on the personal CD players, and allow your minds to wander about what it means to see your neighbor, not as you have defined them to be or by what you think they might need from your advocacy, but as neighbors who glow as they give and laugh as they receive.