Thrive Center Tacoma turns two this month. Site director Anna Bondarenko talks about what it took to build a home, and what it's become.
Ask Anna Bondarenko how the last two years have gone, and she has to stop and count. "It's only been two years," she says. "But it seems like we've lived a lifetime."
Thrive Center Tacoma opened its doors in September 2024, on a stretch of South Hosmer Street that most people in Tacoma knew for the wrong reasons. Many of the first families came straight from the Kent encampment. Anna went out and picked them up herself.
"Maybe this is not for print," she says, "but we didn't have real doors."
That first week, a pregnant resident was in pain and Anna called the fire department. They told her they wouldn't come out without a police escort. That's the neighborhood this was.
Last week a kid pulled a fire alarm, as the new ones always do, and the engine was there in three minutes. One of the firefighters recognized her. You're Anna, right? I was just thinking we haven't been out here in a while. I hear you run a tight ship.
"That's when it hit me," she says. "Two years. Somewhere out there, you guys are talking about us."
A village, not a shelter
Anna doesn't call it a facility. She calls it "our village on Hosmer Street," and she means it in the literal, unglamorous sense: around 150 children live here, and Anna is the emergency contact for every one of them. When the school district calls because a kindergartner needs to be met at the bus, she's the one who walks out to the curb.
Two communities share the building: Spanish speakers from Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, and Portuguese, French, and Lingala speakers from Angola and Congo. Anna doesn't speak any of those languages. "I've lived in Google Translate since 2023," she laughs. But she has a rule about it. When someone texts her in English, she translates her reply back into their language anyway. "I don't want them to feel like they have to translate what they're trying to tell me. If we both translate, that's an unspoken respect toward each other."
Two years in, something has shifted. "People speak to me in Spanish or Portuguese and I understand. I speak to them in English and they understand. It's such a beautiful moment."
Why the kids don't translate
There's a reason Anna has hired staff who speak every language in the building, and it goes back a long way.
She came to the United States as a refugee child from Kyrgyzstan in the early '90s, right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her mother never learned English. It took her parents seven years to get their green cards, a process that was supposed to take one, and during those years her father's mother died overseas and they couldn't leave the country to bury her.
Anna remembers standing at the immigration office as a kid, her mother on the other side of the glass, furious, shouting in Russian while everyone in the room understood exactly what she meant even if they didn't understand a word. Anna, who already spoke perfect English, was mortified.
"I'd forgotten that part of my family's journey," she says. "And then I remembered. That's why I work so hard to make sure the kids here are not put in the place of taking on adult responsibilities: translating, advocating for their parents. That's not their job."
What happens naturally
Nobody planned the soccer field. In October 2024, a few weeks after move-in, Anna pulled into the parking lot and found a full pitch spray-painted onto the asphalt by the kids. It has since been properly marked, and half the lot is now off-limits by community consensus: at 4:30 every afternoon, the cars are gone and the kids are playing. The original players are 16 and 17 now, and a second, younger team has taken their place.
The dance team started the same way. A speaker in the lobby, girls dancing after hours, then a resident who knew how to dance stepped in to teach. There have been a few rounds since. "Girl drama," Anna says. "It all broke up, and then it started again."
The rhythm of leaving
Most families follow a pattern. The first four months are hard: asylum paperwork, school enrollment, finding work, and learning the rhythms of a building with door codes and community guidelines. By month six, Anna says, "it's smooth sailing." More recently, with more single mothers with two and three kids, that timeline stretches. Getting a job, saving a little, and building a routine takes longer when you're doing it alone.
But when families leave, they leave on their own terms. "They came in from a shelter, or running from other states, without a job, some without work authorization," Anna says. "And they leave with a signed lease that they qualified for on their own."
One family of four came from the Kent encampment, stayed six months, all found work, and moved into an apartment in the spring of 2025. That fall they showed up again, not because anything had gone wrong, but because they'd outgrown the apartment and wanted help filling out an application for a house. They got it.
"People keep coming back," Anna says. "Not to live here. Just with a random question. Because they feel comfortable coming back."
The night everyone ran
The story Anna wants people to hear is about a night last fall when a seven-year-old wandered off the property. He was visiting a family in the building while his mother was giving birth, and he'd been gone two hours before anyone realized.
Anna posted to the building's three group chats. Within minutes the whole village was outside: teenagers running to the neighboring properties, parents from both language communities searching in the dark. She drove to the encampment down the street and asked if anyone had seen a boy in orange. Is he from the Thrive place? they asked, and promised to keep an eye out.
The police had already found him. A social worker was involved, and the officer, who knew the building and knew Anna, called back to say he felt comfortable releasing the boy to his family.
Afterward Anna went back to the encampment to say thank you. "They were still engaged. They were glad we'd found him," she says. "This whole collective moment, the residents, the neighbors, the police. That's Thrive. Two years after we came here."
What she wants you to know
"Behind every closed door is a human heart that has cried tears," Anna says. "They crossed the border with an expectation, and the reality was not the same. These are beautiful people. This is a place people can call home. They walk through the door and feel, at least, safety."
Residents tell her they feel safe here. Some don't want to leave. "My husband said, 'What are we going to do if something happens? Anna's going to be out there.' And I'm like, I love that you have so much confidence in me. But I'm scared too."
"What I want people to know is that we are worth keeping. We are worth loving. Our village is what makes Tacoma beautiful. Our people are what made Hosmer better and safer."
She says it plainly, at the end, the way you'd say it about any home: "I don't want to leave. This is our home."
How to help
Anna's asks are specific:
If you're an immigration attorney, families here need you. Volunteer your time.
Sponsor a family's housing. Residents pay a modest program fee, and that matters. It builds the rental history that lets them qualify for a lease of their own. Some, especially single parents and those whose cases are stuck in immigration limbo, can't cover it right now. You can cover it for them.
To get involved, contact Heather, Thrive Tacoma's community outreach coordinator, at heather@thriveinternational.org
Thrive Center Tacoma will mark its second anniversary with a community celebration on September 26: spoken word, a collaborative art piece, and the village itself.
