The American Indian Community Center can finally move ahead on building its permanent home at Spokane’s High Bridge Park.
The City Council unanimously approved a 50-year renewable lease between the nonprofit and the Parks and Recreation department.
The lease is a nominal $1 per year. But the new center is expected to bring more than $800,000 worth of improvements to the land.
Karen Stratton, the capital campaign manager for the project, said the Center and the Parks department have been visiting sites for years to find the right spot.
"One of the locations happened to be the one down at High Bridge Park," she said. "That’s a meaningful location. It’s the ancestral fishing grounds of the Spokane Tribe. It’s where the tribes traded and fished and celebrated. That’s when the lightbulb went off and they said, ‘If we can make this work, let’s do it.’”
Now that the land is secured, Stratton said it will be easier to continue fundraising.
Washington’s governor included two million dollars for the center in his budget proposal. AICC is asking Congress for the same amount. At Monday night's legislative meeting, City Council member Paul Dillon asked local residents to contact their legislators about prioritizing AICC funding.
With the roughly $3 million dollars it already has, the center will begin phasing in its operations.
Stratton says it will start with an expanded food bank and office space for family services programs, perhaps by the end of this year.
The goal is to reach 12-and-a-half million to build a large venue for powwows and funerals, a sweat lodge, and a commercial grade kitchen.
The Center is also eager to partner with the Salish School of Spokane, which is going through its own relocation process. The School and the Center will be close enough to encourage sharing spaces and programs between themselves and the broader community.
"The Salish school will have a gymnasium. We won't have one. Maybe we can use theirs," Stratton said. "We'll have classrooms. Maybe they can use ours. Maybe we can do environmental education, salmon education to students from the public schools. So it really is going to be a central place for community to come together, not just for services, but for the community that might want to participate in something."
For Stratton, a past Spokane City Council member who could be retired and "sitting at home raising cats," making this dream a reality is personal.
"My mother was the first Native American woman elected to the House of Representatives in Olympia," Stratton said. "She was a Spokane tribal member. So my childhood was kind of split between Spokane where my parents raised us, but we still on our weekends were on the Spokane reservation. So this is kind of full circle...my mom would be really, really proud."
