South Park Senior Citizens

Mission

SPSC promotes healthy aging by creating a space of belonging that provides culturally responsive support services, including sustainable access to nutritious meals, social services, physical activities, continued learning, and social engagement. 

Description

Every day, hundreds of immigrant and refugee seniors in King County face barriers to food security, health care, and social inclusion. At South Park Senior Citizens (SPSC), we meet these challenges head-on by annually serving over 10,300 culturally tailored meals, providing 1,900 points of social service support, and facilitating 470 hours of enrichment activities. 

Since our founding in 1985, SPSC has adapted and responded to the urgent needs of seniors, delivering 600 weekly meals during the pandemic, hiring multilingual social service navigators, and launching a medical access program. At the same time, we have created a safe, welcoming, diverse, and inclusive community that draws seniors from across 60 Zip codes to our senior center located in the south Seattle neighborhood of South Park. Every year, SPSC attracts new seniors to our programs primarily through the word-of-mouth referrals of the seniors we’ve served well—a fact that fills us with pride.   

Our seniors’ unique lived experiences, cultural backgrounds, and heritages all contribute to the vibrancy of the SPSC community. Every day, we are inspired by our seniors’ resilience and perseverance and we hope you will decide to contribute to their independence, wellness, and social connectedness.

About SPSC Seniors: The diversity of our seniors contributes to the richness of SPSC’s culture. At SPSC, our community is represented by over 90% of immigrants and refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Latin America; the additional 10% of those served are of Black, Native American, Indigenous, and White descent. Each senior adds value to our community through their lived experiences, wisdom, perspective, humor, creativity, generosity, and so many other wonderful personal attributes.  

Ten Senior Program Ambassadors, who represent our Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hispanic seniors provide the vital communication link between their peers and SPSC leadership to create culturally authentic and inclusive activities. Senior Program Ambassadors provide constant feedback on the quality of our congregate meals and cultural/social activities, and our staff and leadership adapt programs and services according to their input.