Amara broke ground Monday, August 3, on a major remodel of its Pierce County Family Resource Center in Tacoma, a project that will renovate nearly half of the existing building and add new spaces for families before the site temporarily closes its doors later this month for construction.
The groundbreaking marked the start of a 2,917-square-foot interior renovation covering roughly 50% of the existing facility, according to Amara. The nonprofit says the work includes hazardous material abatement and a full layout redesign, and the design itself was shaped by input gathered since 2018 from people with lived child welfare experience. Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello attended the ceremony and toured the project site, according to a Pierce County post describing the event, which credited Amara with providing thoughtful, trauma-informed child welfare services to families in the county.
New Spaces Aim to Serve Whole Families
Once finished, the remodeled facility will include a free thrift store, an art studio inside its teen drop-in center, and dedicated indoor spaces for family gathering and therapeutic healing, per the same account from Amara. The center, located at 3501 104th Street East in Tacoma's Midland neighborhood between Waller and Vickery roads in unincorporated Pierce County, sits within the Franklin Pierce School District. It currently operates without income or eligibility requirements, offering an emergency food pantry supplied by Eloise's Cooking Pot, diapers through the Pierce County Diaper Bank Network, hygiene products, and housing navigation to any family that walks in.
That low-barrier model — families can access food pantries and monthly diaper distribution without formal qualification — is central to what the physical expansion is meant to support, the organization notes. But the construction comes with a real disruption: the center will suspend physical operations from August 17 through mid-November, offering interim services elsewhere before hosting a ribbon-cutting once full services resume at the renovated location later this year.
Tribal and County Dollars Fund the Build
The remodel's funding and organizational backing came together through a public-private partnership that includes the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Pierce County, the Washington State Department of Commerce, the McEachern Foundation, Cheney Foundation, Heritage Bank, and Columbia Bank, according to Amara. The exact dollar figure behind the remodel was not disclosed in materials describing the project.
Mello, who became Pierce County's seventh executive on January 1, 2025, after winning election in November 2024 following four years on the Pierce County Council, has made human services oversight a recurring theme of his tenure — Hoodline previously reported on leadership turnover in the county's human services department and detailed his $3.5 billion countywide budget last fall. Amara itself has operated in the region since 1921, delivering child welfare services, foster caregiver licensing, kinship support, post-adoption resources, and youth development programming out of main offices in both Seattle and Tacoma, according to Cause IQ.
Part of a Broader Shift Toward Prevention
The expansion arrives amid a documented statewide move away from removing children from their homes and toward preventative, community-based support. Washington recorded a 35.6% decrease in the total number of children in out-of-home foster care placements between state fiscal years 2018 and 2023, according to the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, a shift the agency links to laws like House Bill 1227 that raised the safety standards required before removing a child from a home.
That preventative approach is playing out against a backdrop of rising housing instability in Pierce County. The county's 2025 Point-in-Time count recorded 2,955 individuals experiencing homelessness, an 11% increase over the previous year, Hoodline reported. Low-barrier hubs like Amara's are designed in part to catch families before an economic crisis escalates into a child welfare intervention, connecting the center's basic-needs pantry and diaper bank services to the county's larger housing and safety-net challenges.
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