Evergreen Growing · Olympia, Washington

Most of us live in the middle. It's time the middle was heard.

The cost of living keeps climbing, neighbors are leaving, and the loudest voices at the edges set the agenda — while the rest of us are busy working, raising kids, and keeping businesses open. Evergreen Growing is a civic platform for the quiet middle: listening first, following the evidence, and showing up where decisions get made. This is the Evergreen State. Let's grow it together.

Tell us what you're seeing Where this began
A balanced top serves the hand
that set it moving.
1
Listen in public
Community listening sessions, across party lines
2
Map the system
Iceberg canvases — events, patterns, root causes
3
Follow the evidence
Public records — where your tax dollars actually go
4
Show up
Council meetings, public comment, the hearings where decisions get made
5
Close the loop
Report back what we heard and what happened next
Where I've been · Where we're going

This didn't start as a movement.
It started as a question about a pool.

Each step grew out of what the community brought to the last one. That's the point — and it's how the next step will be decided too.

February 2026

Save the Evergreen Pool Ongoing campaign

On February 26, 2026, The Evergreen State College announced it would close its 11-lane public pool — the largest south of Federal Way and the only public pool on Olympia's westside — a grassroots campaign formed within weeks. Nearly 4,000 signatures, 630+ pages of public records reviewed, and hard questions the college has still not fully answered. This campaign is active and continuing.

May 2026

"The pool is the canary in the coal mine"

The first op-ed, published in the Thurston Chronicle, made the case that the pool closure was not an isolated decision but a symptom — the theater department, the indoor soccer arena, the bookstore, all gone the same way. Read it →

June 2026

Evergreen Growing Nonprofit founded

The pool campaign grew into an advocacy organization for the whole college. Evergreen Growing ran its first community listening sessions, gathered testimony from faculty, students, alumni, parents, and neighbors, and published a second op-ed — "Stop Trying to Curl the Straight" — proposing a concrete path forward built on what makes Evergreen structurally unlike anywhere else.

July 2026

The receipts start landing Accountability in action

Findings from Evergreen Growing's public-records work were reported to the Washington State Auditor's Office, which flagged the matters for review in the college's next audit — and the findings will be published for the community to read as soon as a complete set of records is obtained. Asking hard questions works. Documents don't argue back.

Now — Summer 2026

The same method, opened to everything squeezing us

Housing a 25-year-old can't afford. Energy bills driven up by policies written without the people paying them. Small businesses drowning in costs. A homelessness response that manages the crisis at great expense instead of improving it. Institutions that answer to themselves. The listening that worked for one institution is now open to all of it — and what the community raises most will shape what comes next.

Why balance matters

A balanced top serves the hand that set it moving. A tilting one serves only its own momentum.

Our system of government is built on balance — the idea that good policy comes from the friction of genuine disagreement, tested in the open, answerable to someone. When that friction disappears, policy comes out lopsided: built to satisfy an agenda instead of the people who have to carry it. Balanced policy is seldom either/or; it's an and. Environmental progress and affordability people can live with. Accountability and compassion. The problem isn't that this middle doesn't exist — it's that the middle is quiet, and representatives answer to whoever shows up.

"When balanced, it hums — stable, efficient, resilient, serving the hand that set it moving. When it tilts too far toward self-interest, it wobbles, veers, and falls."
The pillars

One method. Applied to every issue that matters.

Each pillar follows the same process: listening sessions, iceberg systems-mapping, community canvases, and public records where needed. Education is four months in. The others are opening now, shaped by what the community brings.

1 Active — four months of evidence

Education

What does it mean when a nationally recognized experimental college — built for exactly this moment — empties out while its administration looks the other way? Four months of listening and records have produced a documented answer.

Aquatics program was revenue-positive — closed anyway
No pool budget exists in the accounting system — formally admitted
Enrollment at half its 2009 peak — identical to 1982 levels
Read the full Education story →
2 Opening now

Affordability

The average first-time homebuyer in Washington is 40 years old. Young people can't stay. Small businesses can't survive. Every new fee, program, and position is paid for by the same households that are tapped out.

Housing costs and the path to homeownership
Energy costs — environmental progress and bills people can live with
Budget and tax decisions — and who bears the cost
Share your voice on affordability →
3 Opening now

Institutional Accountability

When judges retire early and governors fill the bench. When boards hold one worldview, never challenged. Power, once concentrated, finds ways to stay concentrated.

Judicial appointments and incumbent advantage
Boards and commissions — who sits, who decides
Share your voice on accountability →
4 Opening now

Public Safety

People are dying on our streets. Families deserve a public safety conversation rooted in evidence, not ideology. Tell us what you're seeing in your neighborhood.

Homelessness response — what works, what doesn't
Public safety in Olympia and Thurston County
Share your voice on public safety →
5 You tell us

Something Else

The pillars above came from what the community raised first. The next one will come from what you're seeing that isn't on this list yet. Tell us what's out of balance where you live.

Open to any issue the community identifies
Same method — listen, map, follow the evidence
Share what you're seeing →
What we're hearing

Your input doesn't disappear into a void.

Themes from listening sessions, canvases, and submissions — summarized and updated by the Evergreen Growing team so contributors can see what the community is saying.

Education · The Evergreen State College

The pattern, not the pool

Across 37 voice submissions and two listening sessions, the most repeated theme: the pool is one instance of a pattern — programs cut, facilities dark, decisions made without consultation.

From listening sessions · June 2026
Education · Community

A campus the community wants back

Coaches, theater directors, and neighbors keep describing the same thing: a campus that once anchored community life — swim clubs, performances, concerts — and could again.

From listening sessions · June 2026
Affordability

"My kids can't stay here"

Parents describing children in their twenties with no visible path to homeownership in Washington — the theme that opened the Affordability pillar.

Early submissions · Summer 2026
Closing the loop

You said. We did.

The heaviest thing any of us carries isn't one issue — it's the feeling that nothing we do changes anything. This page exists to prove that feeling wrong. Every note appears. Every session is reported back. And everything listed here traces to something a neighbor said. Being heard should be checkable, not taken on faith.

You said"Where did the money go?" — the question underneath the pool closure, the recreation fee, and the entrepreneurship donation, raised again and again in submissions and sessions.
→
What happenedEvergreen Growing's public-records findings were reported to the Washington State Auditor's Office, which has flagged the matters for the college's next audit. The findings will be published for the community to read as soon as a complete set of records is obtained.
You saidA student who moved across the country for a performing arts program found it no longer existed — a locked stage on arrival.
→
What happenedThat testimony anchored the June op-ed "Stop Trying to Curl the Straight" and its proposal for an arts & entrepreneurship pathway built on the Changemaker Lab.
You said"Does this go anywhere?" — the most common question at listening sessions.
→
What happenedThis section exists because of that question. Every published action traces back to something the community submitted.
Live listening sessions

Come say it in person.

Listening sessions are open to everyone — supporters, skeptics, and everyone in between. Attendees add feedback directly to the live canvases during the session, and every session ends with a public summary of what was heard.

Next session — to be announced

Community Listening Session

Sessions are typically held at the Olympia Timberland Library. Sign up and you'll be the first to know when the next one is scheduled.

Can't make it in person? The live canvases and feedback forms are open around the clock — and every session's input lands in the same place.

Get notified · RSVP

Leave your name and email and we'll let you know about upcoming listening sessions. Nothing else — no fundraising lists, no sharing your details.

Thank you — you're on the list. We'll email you when the next session is scheduled.
Published writing

Three pieces. One arc.

Thurston Chronicle · May 4, 2026

Evergreen's Pool Is the Canary in the Coal Mine

An emptying campus is not a sign that Evergreen's model has failed. It may be a sign that its leadership has lost sight of what makes it irreplaceable.

Read at the Thurston Chronicle → Thurston Chronicle · June 11, 2026

Stop Trying to Curl the Straight

Evergreen is not a conventional college that fell behind. It is a structurally different institution that spent fifty years building exactly the education the AI economy now demands.

Read at the Thurston Chronicle → Newest · Thurston Chronicle · July 24, 2026

You Can't Get Blood From a Turnip

"No amount of squeezing gets you something that isn't there." On the households and small businesses that are tapped out while every problem is answered with another fee — and why the quiet middle needs to become a constituency no one can afford to ignore. Republican, Democrat, Independent, or done with voting entirely: welcome.

Read at the Thurston Chronicle →
Amalie O'Connor
Amalie O'Connor
Founder & President, Evergreen Growing
Former educator & federal budget analyst
Longtime Olympia resident · Parent
About Amalie

Washington's best days are ahead — if we're honest enough to earn them.

Amalie O'Connor has lived in Olympia for more than twenty years. She is a former educator, federal budget analyst, and state employee — and the parent of an Evergreen student. She co-chaired the Olympia Together campaign in 2025. She founded Evergreen Growing after coming to believe that the gap between what our institutions promise and what they deliver is not an accident. It's what happens when no one asks hard questions and no one is required to answer them.

She started with The Evergreen State College because that's where the evidence was sharpest: four months of public records, listening sessions, and forensic analysis, published twice in the Thurston Chronicle. But the college was always one example of a bigger pattern — institutions across Washington that have stopped answering to the communities they serve.

Her invitation is deliberately wide: "If you are a Republican, I welcome you. If you are a Democrat, I welcome you. If you have given up on voting, I welcome you." The concerns driving this work — the erosion of accountability, power serving itself instead of the public — are not partisan. They are American, and they show up close to home.

"This state is ours. These communities are ours. Our future — for your children, for mine — is ours to create."
Reach out — share your voice
Evergreen Growing logo — the mother tree

Amalie designed the Evergreen Growing logo with a book in mind: Finding the Mother Tree by scientist Suzanne Simard, who discovered that trees in a forest are not competing — they are communicating, sharing nutrients through a vast underground network, nurturing the young and vulnerable. Otto Scharmer at MIT grounds his work in the same idea: sustainable change begins by nurturing the social soil. Scharmer names the deepest problem of this moment plainly — not any one crisis, but the shared sense that we're powerless to change any of it. Evergreen Growing is built as the answer to that: a place where acting visibly changes something, where neighbors sense what's possible together, and where agency grows back the way a forest does — through connection. Washington is the Evergreen State. The roots are deep. The community is connected. And the forest is still worth growing.