Cult Northwest

We Heart Seattle Doesn't

Five years, nearly a million dollars a year, and a brand that keeps treating Seattle's homeless neighbors like the trash in the bags.

William Hughes used to live under the Ship Canal Bridge. In 2024 he told KIRO Newsradio about the day Andrea Suarez, the founder of We Heart Seattle, came through his camp. A friend of his had been gone for a couple of days. The friend's tent was still standing, and his things were still inside it. "But he lived there, and his stuff was in there," Hughes said. According to Hughes, Suarez stepped on the tent and said, "Looks like trash to me."

That's the scene I can't shake whenever someone tells me We Heart Seattle is just neighbors with gloves and garbage bags. The heart is right there in the name. So is a budget that brought in $947,580 in 2025. What's missing is anything that makes the group answer to the public. In 2024 the city said it had no contracts with them. When a reporter asked Suarez whether she held any license for the outreach work she does, she answered with a question about Jesus.

I spend a big part of every week in Seattle. I work with the Tulalip Tribes, and I know what it looks like when a community gets treated as a nuisance instead of as people. So when a donor-funded nonprofit spends five years telling talk radio that the problem with Seattle is the people living in its parks, I don't hear compassion. I hear a campaign.

This is what that campaign looks like, sourced, one piece at a time.

We Heart Seattle started in October 2020 as I Heart Downtown Seattle. Suarez, a Belltown resident, has said she started it over the graffiti, garbage and condemned buildings in her neighborhood. The group runs trash pickups in parks and encampments. It also does what Suarez calls welfare checks. Her instruction to volunteers, as KIRO reported it: "go within 20 feet, do a welfare check."

The numbers it publishes are big. Over a million pounds of trash in three years and more than 11,000 volunteer hours, Suarez told KIRO in April 2024. By August 2026 she was telling KOMO it was 2.2 million pounds. Every one of those figures comes from We Heart Seattle itself, and I haven't found anyone who has independently checked them.

Picking up trash is fine. I'm not here to argue for garbage. What I want to know is what else ends up in the bags.

What the people in the tents said

The complaints started almost as soon as the group did. In March 2021 the South Seattle Emerald reported on a letter from mutual aid groups asking all nine Seattle councilmembers to disavow the group. It accused We Heart Seattle of illegally removing people's belongings and putting cleanups ahead of the welfare of the people living there.

In the same story, Sam, who was living at Miller Park, recalled Suarez suggesting people pick up a bag of garbage in exchange for a burger, and comparing the campers to "rats and dogs." Suarez called the burger story "false." On the animal comparison, she told the Emerald she had just gotten a new puppy and that "creatures thrive when they have empowerment, when there's accountability." Read that twice.

On March 7, 2021, at Daejeon Park on Beacon Hill, a We Heart Seattle volunteer was caught on video opening and going into a homeless person's tent while they were away. Suarez disavowed it, and the volunteer apologized online. Councilmember Tammy Morales put it plainly: "If this happened to a housed person, this would be considered burglary." Councilmember Andrew Lewis told KOMO, "I do not condone private groups conducting any such activities." Sandi Olson, a mutual aid volunteer, called it a "white savior complex": the cameras, the publicity, and no room for criticism.

Later that year, by Suarez's own account to KOMO, Councilmember Dan Strauss and at least ten other city leaders got on a call with her, called the group's work "disruptive and confusing," and asked it to stop working in the parks. They kept going.

Three years later came Hughes and his friend's tent. Different park, same pattern.

Outreach without the training

This is the part that worries me most, because it's where people get hurt.

Seattle has outreach teams like REACH and LEAD. Alycia Ramirez, a mutual aid worker, told KIRO that "these are trained social workers" with "the training and knowledge to make that harm less impactful." About We Heart Seattle, she said: "No one is a trained social worker. I don't think anyone on Andrea's board, including Andrea herself, has any prior experience with that."

Suarez disagrees. "We are caseworkers," she told KIRO. "We've been through trauma-informed care training, de-escalation training, on-the-job training." Then KIRO asked whether she held any official licensing. Her answer: "I don't know, did Jesus Christ have a license?" Hughes, who is Christian, had his own answer ready: "Jesus wouldn't do the things I've seen her do."

YouthCare, which runs the Orion Center for young people, told KIRO about a woman who identified herself as Andrea Suarez of We Heart Seattle and asked about a young client by name. YouthCare said she "was not known to the staff as a caseworker (or) as a case manager." Staff asked her to wait outside to protect other clients' privacy. Suarez said it happened in 2020, not 2021. She didn't dispute the rest.

Outreach runs on trust, and trust takes a long time to build. Aiden Carroll, another mutual aid worker, told KIRO that real outreach workers spend a lot of effort "demonstrating that they're sincere," and that this kind of freelance work is "creating more barriers." If you've heard what happened to the last guy's tent, why would you open up to the next stranger who says they're there to help?

Follow the money

We Heart Seattle's own IRS filings, posted on ProPublica, tell the growth story.

Year Revenue Top paid officer
2025 $947,580 Suarez, $118,516
2024 $963,805 Suarez, $102,342
2023 $760,991 Suarez, $55,000
2022 $536,257 Kevin Dahlgren, $29,350
2021 $275,404 Dahlgren, $5,327
2020 $5,644 Suarez, $0

Donations make up 96% to 100% of that revenue every single year. Suarez's reported pay more than doubled from 2023 to 2025. According to KOMO, she's the group's only employee.

So who's writing the checks? I don't know, and neither do you. The public filings don't name donors, and I haven't found We Heart Seattle volunteering that list. For a group that spends this much time on the radio talking about everyone else's accountability, that's a hell of a blind spot.

In April 2024 the mayor's office said the city had no active contracts with We Heart Seattle, and that it wasn't a registered volunteer group with Seattle Parks. That same summer, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported the group planned to bid on an open $300,000 government homelessness services contract. That would have put it right alongside the service providers Suarez spends so much time attacking. I couldn't find whether that bid went anywhere.

Look at that table again. For two years the top paid officer wasn't Suarez. It was Kevin Dahlgren, who was named the group's president in April 2022. KIRO reported that We Heart Seattle paid him about $30,000 in consulting fees that year. Dahlgren also had a day job as a homeless services specialist for the City of Gresham, Oregon. In October 2023 he was indicted on theft, identity theft and official misconduct charges, accused of stealing the identities of homeless people near Portland. He pleaded guilty in January 2025, according to KATU and The Oregonian.

To be fair to the facts: Suarez says his case "has absolutely nothing to do with us," and his crimes happened in his city job, not at We Heart Seattle. That's true, and I'll say it. But the question isn't whether We Heart Seattle committed his crimes. It's who the group chose to put in charge, and pay, while it asked Seattle to trust its judgment about homeless people.

The politics

In 2024 Suarez ran for the state House in the 43rd District as a Democrat. She raised more than $106,500. Her endorsements came from Councilmember Bob Kettle, Seattle King County Realtors and the Seattle Times editorial board, which wrote that sending her opponent, Shaun Scott, to Olympia "would be akin to electing a far-right MAGA Republican." The Jackson Legacy Fund, a political fund set up to elect "pragmatic Democrats," spent about $18,000 on her behalf.

The state Democratic Party said she was "not a bona fide Democrat." Paul Chapman, who chairs the 43rd District Democrats, said she had agreed to appear at GOP-sponsored events and posed for a photo with Republican-backed governor candidate Semi Bird. Suarez said Democrats were bullying her.

Her platform said a lot. She wanted to help dissolve "wasteful solutions and programs like the King County Regional Homelessness Authority." She was frustrated by money spent on harm reduction like needle exchanges, and said free handouts deflate people "of their psychological drive." In her words: "I don't want them to be on the government dime for life." She wanted more police and backed Truleo, a tool that uses analytics to oversee police. If you've read my surveillance pieces, you know why that one caught my eye.

Then there's what she wouldn't say. At an endorsement interview with The Stranger, she was asked whether she'd support a bill making it illegal for officers to bargain over accountability. Her answer: "I don't think I'm really clear, so I'm just not going to answer the question." Asked whether transgender kids have the right to make medical decisions with their doctors, she said she didn't have enough "information." I've written about both of those fights on this blog. They aren't hard questions.

The voters answered for her. Scott won 68.43% to her 30.81%, or 49,990 votes to 22,506.

The fear pipeline

Losing by almost 40 points didn't shrink her microphone. Suarez has been a regular on Seattle's conservative radio since the start: Jason Rantz on KTTH in January 2021, Dori Monson and Ari Hoffman later that year. Rantz praised the group's Denny Park cleanups in a Fox News opinion column in March 2021.

The volume went up after November 2025, when Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, beat Bruce Harrell for mayor, 50.2% to 49.5%. In February, Suarez told Rantz that homelessness had started to "revert back quite quickly over the last four months" and that "it's the worst I've seen in years." His column cited no city data. In March, on the John Curley Show, she said: "Based on my experience over five years, half the people who are in those encampments have housing." She gave no data for that either. She called for making "crime illegal again," and said of San Francisco's RESET Center, where drug users are arrested and steered into diversion: "I love that program, 100%." She said San Francisco's Prop F, which she described as requiring a drug test to get services, "stops the inflow."

Then there's the Discovery Institute. Its Center on Wealth & Poverty runs a site called Fix Homelessness, and its senior fellow there is Jonathan Choe, a longtime KOMO reporter who joined in May 2022. The site's Andrea Suarez tag holds ten posts on its first page alone, every one from 2026. On October 15 it ran a post naming the man who reported We Heart Seattle to the state, pulled from public records. Suarez says he never worked or volunteered for the group.

Sit with that. You file a safety complaint with a state agency, and a think tank fellow publishes your name. That's what accountability gets you in this ecosystem. And it's how the machine works: cleanup footage goes up, the fear framing gets attached, and the whole thing becomes an argument against a socialist mayor and the people sleeping in Seattle's parks.

A needle problem

In August 2026, KOMO reported that Washington's Department of Labor and Industries was investigating We Heart Seattle. The complaint alleged volunteers were improperly handling and collecting "hypodermic needles and fentanyl-related paraphernalia." Investigators asked for the group's written safety program, its bloodborne pathogen procedures, its training materials and the hepatitis B vaccination forms for volunteers. L&I said the investigation could lead to fines.

Suarez called it "an egregious overreach of the state." She said, "We are doing it properly." She also said the group had not provided hepatitis vaccinations to its volunteers.

Even KIRO's own hosts weren't buying the outrage. Gee Scott said that if everything is done safely, "this is something that can easily be rectified and move on." Ursula Reutin said, "All they need to do is just say, 'Hey, this is what we have.'"

This is a group that preaches order and accountability for everyone else. It sends volunteers to pick up needles without offering them hep B shots, and it calls a records request overreach. As of this writing, I haven't found any public finding from L&I.

Her best case

I'll give Suarez her best case, because ignoring it would make this piece weaker.

Trash gets picked up. In October 2022, according to Real Change, We Heart Seattle volunteers stopped an attack in a tent near a cleanup and drove the woman to a tiny house village. The Seattle Times named Suarez among the region's "gifts" in December 2021. The group took part in the mayor's One Seattle Day of Service in 2023 and 2024.

And there's Patrick Burnite. In 2021 Suarez drove him to the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in Portland, and We Heart Seattle paid for his first month there, the Emerald reported. Today he's one of the group's outreach workers. That's a real person whose life changed, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But the cleanups were never the problem. Making people into the trash is the problem. In April 2026, city and state crews cleared encampments from Beacon Hill parks, Daejeon Park among them, the same park where a We Heart Seattle volunteer went into someone's tent five years earlier. Burnite told KOMO, "This is probably as bad as it gets." Back in 2024, Suarez told KIRO, "Frankly, I think we have become unassailable."

Nobody is unassailable

Nobody is. Not a police department, not a mayor, and not a nonprofit with a heart in its name and nearly a million dollars a year behind it.

In my work with the Tulalip Tribes, I've learned you can't help a community you've already decided is the problem. Care looks like housing. It looks like harm reduction that keeps people alive long enough to get better. It looks like trained outreach workers who know the person's name because they earned it, not because they showed up with a camera. And it looks like groups that answer to the public when the public has questions.

We Heart Seattle picks up the trash. The rest of us should stop letting it decide who counts as trash.

Sources

#homelessness #housing #outreach #seattle