Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, joined The Day With Trae

Trae Holiday sat down with Plymouth Housing CEO Karen Lee to talk about her new role with the company, her background, and the work they’re doing to create safe, supportive and sustainable housing.

Lee spoke about her beginnings, growing up with a military father and a mother who was a teacher.

“I grew up seeing both the racial discrimination that came with being a child in Virginia in the ‘60s, but also what can happen when we were given a chance,” Lee said.

Lee says she wanted to have a life similar to her parents and to “make the world a little better”. Plymouth Housing is the next step in that journey for Lee, as she builds on a accolade-filled career that was sparked when she was the first Black woman from Washington to graduate from West Point.

“You get a lot of good things from an academy,” Lee said. “There weren’t many women, there were restrictions on what we could do, there was tough treatment for women.”

She said that through that experience she learned both discipline and perseverance, and that “the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they turn.”

Lee also spoke about the causes of an individual becoming unhoused, and the things Plymouth is doing to help support them.

“It’s almost a failure of every institution that we have [when someone becomes unhoused'],” Lee said. “It’s sad. In Seattle, we know the number, we register people. If we had a place for them to go, we could get them there.”

She said that she carries the belief that the greater Seattle community has a desire to come together and solve this problem, and that Plymouth can tap into that desire in order to create solutions.

“What we offer is permanent supportive housing,” Lee said. “Plymouth serves people that are chronically homeless, individuals who have a disability and need that support.”

Lee said 50% of the individuals Plymouth serves are People of Color, and that 27% are Black.

“We want to do what we can to be a learning organization that respects individuals, and that makes people feel seen,” Lee said. “I’m proud that we’re an organization centered on the needs of individuals who have been treated as ‘less-than’ in the past.”

You can find out more about Plymouth Housing here, and watch the full interview above.