A court had already declared his nonprofit owed millions of dollars. He’d long since lost the lease to its Spokane building. Eighty immigrants and refugees were facing the prospect of losing their housing. But Thrive International CEO Mark Finney struck an optimistic note this Thursday.
“Even if we can't continue to use that particular building, we'd sure love to be able to continue our mission and expand it in Spokane and across the state, because the needs are huge,” Finney said.
In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Thrive had turned Quality Inn buildings in both Spokane and Tacoma into temporary housing for hundreds of immigrants seeking asylum. But now, the refugee housing organization has hit extremely dire financial straits.
For a year and a half, Thrive has been locked in a legal battle with The Olmsted, the company that owns the nonprofit’s Spokane facility. In January, an arbitrator had declared that Thrive owed The Olmsted $3.3 million, including over $300,000 in legal fees for the building owner’s fleet of lawyers. After the verdict, The Olmsted declared in legal filings that they had the right to boot out Thrive and every tenant staying there.
“There was some indication that the intention was also to rapidly evict all of the families that were there as well,” Finney said. So Finney and the Thrive board made one more play: they handed over the keys to their non-profit to a receiver, someone with the ability to liquidate a floundering business’s assets.
That move had one very important advantage: it froze all the legal proceedings, including any efforts to evict immigrants en masse.
“That means that I have a lot of breathing space here,” said Shelly Crocker, the receiver now in control of Thrive.
Sometimes receivers act like a chop shop, dismantling a wreck and selling off the scraps.
But Crocker is different. She’s brought multiple nonprofits — not to mention 20 Papa John’s stores — back from the brink of death. And she’s not planning on simply clearing out all the tenants.
“I have dueling priorities,” Crocker said. “I do have an obligation to deal with the debt that is owed. I also have an obligation to care for the very vulnerable people who are living there.”
THE LEASE OF THESE
It’s not unusual for nonprofits — heavy in idealism, light in expertise — to run into a mess of financial problems.
“One of the things about receivership is you just get dropped in the middle of this soup,” Crocker said. “There were a number of operational concerns … There had not been a high-level financial professional in place.”
Thrive had been put together quickly. Just five months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent thousands of families to seek sanctuary in America, Thrive found the downtown hotel to convert into temporary refugee housing: A place where new immigrants and asylum seekers could stay, three months at a time, as they learned language skills and tried to find employment.
The building owner was technically called The Olmsted, but it was just one of dozens of LLCs in Washington and Oregon run by Fortify Holdings. Fortify had purchased numerous struggling motels with the intention of converting them to low-income housing — including two other properties in Spokane. (A call to Fortify Holdings on Friday was not immediately returned. If we hear back we will update this story.)
“We felt we had a pretty productive working relationship with the owner for the first couple years that we were in there,” Finney said.
But in August of 2024, something changed sharply. Fortify handed Thrive a bill for over $360,000 in unpaid property insurance payments, and told them it had to pay the full total in just 30 days. Thrive claimed its attempts to negotiate or work out a payment plan were rejected.
As part of their contract, Thrive had agreed to reimburse Fortify for property insurance but claimed in legal filings that they hadn’t ever received that bill until that August. Thrive filed a counter-suit and stopped paying rent.
Thrive’s lease was terminated on November 3, 2024.
Just two days later, Donald Trump was once again elected president. And that, ultimately, was another financial blow.
“As you know, the national tone about who is welcome and how we support immigration has changed,” said Lars Gilberts, Thrive’s founding board chair.
Even more than during his first term, Trump has treated refugee resettlement with antagonism. He has drastically slashed the number of refugees allowed in the country. He ended temporary protected status programs. He hiked fees for immigrants of all kinds.
“The fees to apply for various immigration supports have just mushroomed,” Finney said. “I’ve got a family of three I'm friends with, and they just reapplied for their work permits. It was $7,000 … and there's no guarantee they’ll even get them.”
Without work permits, immigrants have to rely on charity to survive. And thanks to the Trump administration, federal grants, an important funding stream for organizations like Thrive, were cut off.
“There wasn’t going to be enough cash to make it,” Gilberts said.
With Thrive facing financial ruin, Gilberts loaned Thrive $100,000 of his own money, to provide enough cashflow to keep the organization going.
“We were in the season where things can feel unjust,” Gilberts said. He said he’s forgiven $20,000 of the loan, and prefers to focus on how meaningful their work has been so far.
He’s seen immigrant families flourish and watched immigrant families grow.
“A number of kids have names of our staff because we were the ones wrapping our arms around them when they were born,” Gilberts said.
REAPING, SOWING
But in the meantime, Fortify Holdings itself was staring down massive financial problems on multiple fronts.
Property records obtained by RANGE show that all three Spokane buildings Fortify purchased to renovate have been subject to liens and lawsuits from unpaid contractors.
In June 2023, Fortify was sued by the security company for the Imperial Apartments in downtown Spokane after they weren’t being paid for their services. H&S Construction sued for nearly $250,000 in unpaid construction work on the Imperial, accusing Fortify in June 2024 of using a variety of LLCs to avoid payment. Fortify never responded, and H&S won by default.
According to Spokane Code Enforcement documents, the city spent $15,000 of taxpayer money to board up and protect The James, Fortify’s property near the Finch Arboretum, "due to ownership’s lack of responsiveness, and more importantly, lack of proactive security measures and site management.” If Fortify didn’t fix it, the city threatened to take control of the property.
Spokane was the tip of the iceberg. Fortify faced liens on The Waverly apartments in Tacoma. It missed property tax payments in Ellensberg. The city of Kennewick filed a lien for failing to secure a dilapidated building that had become a public nuisance — and considered simply demolishing the building.
By July 2024, the Oregonian reported that Fortify’s founder Sean Keys owed nearly $1 million in unpaid personal income taxes and hundreds of thousands of unpaid property taxes on Oregon properties.
“I regret that I have fallen behind in paying business and personal taxes but understand it is my responsibility to get all taxes paid in full along with any penalties,” Keys told the Oregonian.
And it’s not the first time he’s been underwater: Keys owed thousands in unpaid federal taxes in 2017 too.
According to court documents, Finney knew about Fortify’s troubles: in internal texts from November 2024, he had described Fortify as in a “desperate” financial position. He recommended that Thrive needed to “stand strong and the tables could turn around soon,” possibly even giving Thrive a chance “to purchase the building directly from the lender.”
The discussion backfired. The arbitrator cited the text messages from Finney, as proof that Thrive was not operating in good faith, and ordered Thrive to pay the building owner millions.
"The Biblical adage, 'you reap what you sow,' would appear to apply here," the arbitrator wrote in one document.
Notably, it’s a proverb that could apply to Fortify as well.
THRIVE, ALIVE
On a sunny Thursday, a readerboard saying “1184 HARD WORKING NEIGHBORS STARTED HERE” stood outside Thrive in downtown Spokane. The Spokane location is still humming with activity.
The organization is still taking donations. Finney said he hasn’t talked to the current tenants at Thrive about the behind-the-scenes turmoil.
“When most folks come and stay with us, they sign a 90-day agreement, and sometimes we renew those,” Finney said. “We have every reason to believe we can keep them housed until they’re ready for the next step, for stable housing.”
In September 2024, Thrive opened another location in a former hotel in Tacoma. They’re about ready to launch a second location on the north side of Spokane.
“We are about to open up 48 new apartments that we've been in development for the last about 24 months, and those are set to get our certificate of occupancy at the end of next month,” Finney said.
Crocker, the receiver who now runs Thrive, can’t promise the nonprofit will live on, but she sees possibilities.
“We really are excited about the apartments opening,” Crocker said. The immigrants at Thrive’s downtown location who have incomes will have a chance to apply for a permanent spot in these apartments.
Finney even believes that the relationship with Fortify could be healed.
“Even though it's been a pretty difficult year and a half, I still hope that we can get back to the point where we all could really work together and find something that is a solution,” Finney said.
After all, America is the land of second chances.
