Sparrow Etter Carlson, Founder & Co-Executive Director
Hayden Wartes, Co-Executive Director
Since 2004 Sparrow Etter Carlson (she/her) and Hayden Wartes (she/her) have created safe places of hospitality for unhoused neighbors and housed neighbors to encounter one another. Both students of Mental Health Chaplaincy, they co-founded the Green Bean Coffeehouse (a non-profit cafe) in 2005 with Sanctuary Church. Sparrow co-founded Aurora Commons in 2011 and most recently created and launched the Safe, Healthy, Empowered (SHE) Clinic: an accessible, kind, non-judgmental, quality health care clinic for female identified people who sleep and work along Aurora Avenue. She has also worked in policy and planning within the Homelessness Sector.
Sparrow and Hayden are inextricably formed by their twenty years in community with precious human beings along North Aurora Ave. and by the community of Awake, a small neighborhood faith expression that birthed Aurora Commons and continues to cultivate space where people from all walks of life can live as though we belong to one another. For the last eight years Hayden has pastored within the Awake community.
Shelly Vaughn (she/her), Lived Experience Liaison & Street Chaplain
Liz Adams (she/her) , Companionship Trainer & Support
Lizbeth Adams is a certified trainer of the Companionship Model developed by Reverend Craig Rennebohm. She teaches the model in workshops and uses its principles in outreach to unhoused people and others living with trauma. Trained as a neuroscientist and clinical research ethicist, she believes in the healing properties of compassionate interactions. Having lost her brother to mental illness, she believes that each of us is worthy of dignity and each of us deserves respite from suffering.
Melissa Goss-Jentz (she/her), Circles of Care Advisor
Nathan Nelson (he/him), Neighborhood Coalition Lead
Luke Sumner (he/him), Curriculum Advisor
Ren Sullivan (she/her), Co-Founder of Aurora Commons, Holistic Healing and Ritual Advisor
Ericka Frodsham (she/her), Lived Experience Expert and Care Management Advisor
Advisory board: coming soon
Rev. Craig Rennebohm, Founder Emeritus
Our roots in accompaniment, companionship and trauma informed soul care begin in 1987 with the founding of Mental Health Chaplaincy by Rev. Craig Rennebohm. As a chaplain, Craig worked to link congregations together in neighborhood networks of care, train volunteers to serve as companions, create mental health ministries, and advocate for effective and readily accessible community mental health systems. Craig walked a regular route through downtown Seattle, building trust with Seattle’s most vulnerable and supporting individuals toward stability and community. Craig's work has been recognized nationally an internationally through his work, speaking, and writing: Souls in the Hands of a Tender God.