PORT ANGELES — Nan Heathers’ eyes get moist as she talks about the people she wants to help.
A family living in their station wagon. Children kicked out of their homes. Women leaving abusive relationships.
But she has a plan, and people determined to help her.
They’re calling it Port of Angels Mission, and they say Port Angeles can expect to see it up and running this year.
“Things would have to go really bad for us not to go in six months,” Pastor Tom Bryant of Believers Church in Port Angeles said Friday.
Heathers hopes it’s sooner than that.
She says she wants to see the homeless mission opened by the end of April, offering a place to sleep at least 60 needy people, provide them meals, run substance abuse programs, connect them to jobs and education, and teach them about Christianity.
The mission would umbrella under Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, which can provide them with a structure and loan supplies such as cots, say Heathers and Bryant.
Former Aggie’s Motel
What organizers don’t yet have is a location, but they are hoping to purchase the former Aggie’s Motel, 535 E. First St., most recently Tempest youth center.
Two individuals have committed $1.5 million to the project, Heathers said.
The need a $50,000 down payment to secure the site.
Organizers are filling out paperwork now to achieve nonprofit status.
The idea of the mission has grown in part from Bryant’s work feeding homeless and hungry people at City Pier every Friday night.
He used to do so when he was working as a logger in the mid-1990s, he said.
Then he became a pastor. Bryant started the outreach against last spring to connect with teenagers.
Last summer, volunteers fed hotdogs, potato salad and pop to as many as 150 people in one night, said Heathers.
One of their regulars was Melissa Carter, the 15-year-old girl who was raped and strangled, her body left on a wooded trail near the city’s waterfront, just before Christmas.
