In many cases, the households that Andrea Suarez and crew so haphazardly throw away are the only belongings these folks have in the world, which only piles more trauma onto their struggle to survive.

Suarez claims that no one has ever told her she’s thrown away their stuff and continues to ignore the feedback, even when it’s coming directly from the people she’s harming.

Here are some of these first-hand accounts:

1. Andrea Suarez falsely claims to provide assistance with housing
2. We Heart Seattle destroys someone’s tent and belongings for a THIRD time
3. We Heart Seattle volunteers laugh about throwing away pictures of an unhoused person’s children
4. Tim Emerson says he doesn’t need permission to throw away garbage
5. Andrea Suarez says it looks like garbage to her, so it’s garbage
6. We Heart Seattle lies to park residents about having permission to tear down camp sites
7. Andrea Suarez offers dope-sick park residents $25 in cash to let her throw their tents and belongings away

A second collection from our friends, North Seattle Neighbors:

1. Bullying the Unhoused and Calling It Compassion
2. Andrea Suarez, Dog Thief
3. Parks Before People

Andrea Suarez willfully concealed the fact that one of her core volunteers is a registered child sex offender.

She knowingly exposed both the vulnerable population she serves as well as her minor volunteers to potential harm, while outwardly maintaining that her organization does not work with sex offenders of any kind.

We are supportive of recovery and reintegration into society for sex offenders under honest circumstances and believe that Suarez’s choice to handle the situation this way was as unfair to her volunteer as it was anyone who’s safety may have been at risk as a result of his presence.

Suarez remains unapologetic for her actions.

Read more about it here:

• We Heart Seattle Member Lyle Cooper Discovered to be a Registered Sex Offender
• We Heart Seattle Child Sex Offender Cover Up
• We Heart Seattle Sex Offender Fiasco Update

In July of 2023, Andrea Suarez announced that the org had surpassed a million dollars in charitable donations received.

To date, We Heart Seattle has provided very little insight into where their funds come from, how they are used, or as it recently came into question, why they aren’t.

Not a year has gone by that the org hasn’t been delinquent in filing their year-end tax return,  and it wasn’t until just recently that data for 2022 became available. Reviewing it has left us with more questions than it gave us answers.

In 2021, We Heart Seattle booked nearly $300k in revenue in the form of charitable contributions and possibly grants, and closed the year out with $200k in the bank. Their operating costs totaled just under $100k, $70k of which are logged simply as “program expenses” with no enumeration of what those are in the designated section.

2022 tells a similar story. They booked $536k in revenue from charaitable contributions, and some income (presumably earned as a subcontractor through an organization that has a deal with the city for clean-up efforts in the SODO area), and they closed the year out with $240k in the bank. Their operating costs, which they once again fail to provide any meaningful details about, are simply noted as “program expenses” totaling $477k.

One tidbit worthy of mention from 2022’s tax return is the $30k of ambiguous “consulting” fees paid to their former board president Kevin Dahlgren, who would soon thereafter disappear from We Heart Seattle’s fold. We can only imagine what must have happened for this to occur so suddenly, especially in light of Dahlgren’s recent indictment on 19 counts of Theft,  Identity Theft, and Official Misconduct.  

Even if they had paid for every pound of the 1-million pounds of trash they purport to have collected to date (they leave a lot of it for the city to pick up), transfer station fees for this would still not exceed $100k. Apart from this, and sponsoring short-term detox programs for a small handful of people, we’re just not seeing where the money goes, especially with such provenly low operating expenses.

$1.5 million dollars could make a significant positive impact upon the city’s homelessness crisis, which We Heart Seattle has largely failed to do as the custodians of these funds. It really doesn’t help their image to throw accusations around about who might be a profiteer for the homeless industrial complex when they’re sitting on a literal gold mine of charitable contributions without having made a measurable impact upon the cause they claim to exist in support of. 

While we’ve suspected it all along, we can now say with a new degree of confidence that We Heart Seattle is a grift operation. 

Despite what Andrea Suarez would have the world believe, she nor anyone else within the We Heart Seattle organization is a licensed social worker or case manager.

Suarez simply does not possess the qualifications necessary to do the kind of work she is hasty to pat herself on the back for and there is no amount of saying it into existence that will make it true.

From political lobbying and candidate endorsement to employing people who were formerly beneficiaries of We Heart Seattle’s charity, they violate almost every legal requirement for federal recognition as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in good standing.

We Heart Seattle’s saving grace thus far has been a several-year backup in auditing within the IRS on account of being so short-staffed that less than two dozen complaints have been investigated since 2017.

Playing into the “all homeless people are criminals and drug addicts” trope that We Heart Seattle is notorious for spouting, Andrea Suarez and Kevin Dahlgren have both said on multiple occassions that they support police arrest, mandatory rehab and forced hospitalization as a solution for homelessness (although Suarez is careful to state that she doesn’t mean incacerate forever). With the recent addition of Michael Shellenberger to the We Heart Seattle board of directors, they’ve begun pushing even harder on this idea.

Shellenberger is the author of the book San Fransicko, and serves on the board of directors for at least three other organizations similar to We Heart Seattle. He has also made sizable financial contributions to each of them on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, which tells us that he isn’t done with trying to make a run in California state politics.

It is possible to hear this narrative begin to take form during a December 2021 interview on Mike Solan’s podcast Hold the Line, which featuring both Suarez and Dahlgren together, but do be forewarned about the episode’s overall cringe-factor if you decide to check it out.

Andrea Suarez believes in giving people a hand up, not a hand out, not housing first but housing earned, etc.

In accordance with these beliefs, she has written to city council and the mayor’s office on several occassions, urging them to support legislature similar to Spokane, Washington’s recent policy that makes it illegal to bring meals and harm reduction supplies to individuals residing in city parks.

Not surprisingly, death by overdose and instances of Hepatitis and other diseases that are passed through IV-sharing skyrocketed in Spokane following the adoption of this law.

Criminalizing homelessness is not only ineffective, it’s inhumane.

Andrea Suarez is featured as one of the top participants in the group’s Facebook community.

The founder of Safe Seattle, David Preston, has gone so far as to attempt to sue the city of Seattle in order to prevent the construction of tiny home communities that the city provides as transitional housing. He has personally doxxed several people who have been brave enough to speak out against his bigoted, questionably criminal behavior, and one even reported an attempted arson of their residence a few years ago.

Favorable affiliation of any kind with this group immediately raises red flags, which even Suarez herself knew well enough to outwardly distance herself from the association during the first months of We Heart Seattle’s operation, insisting that there was no affiliation. However, as time has gone by, she’s dropped the pretense and no longer attempts to conceal her connection with the hate group and its leader.

In October of 2021, the Seattle City Council ordered We Heart Seattle to cease and desist for many of the same reasons enumerated here.

Mayor Durkan’s office messaged to them when they were beginning their effoerts, that the city does not condone their actions given their refusal to follow the city’s 20-foot rule when working in and around encampments.

Mayor Harrell has largely been silent in response to their many attempts to gain his recognition, and rejected their application for participation in a city sponsored cleanup effort last year.

Mark Dones halted a meeting Suarez had been trying to get invited to for a long time in order to ask her to leave and Councilman Lewis has straight up stopped responding to her text messages that primarily consist of what equate to homeless porn.

We’re not sure why the city hasn’t taken more direct action against them given how clear the messaging is that they want nothing to do with We Heart Seattle.

Emergency shelters and tent cities do not even resemble long term housing solutions, and yet this is where many of the people Andrea Suarez claims to have helped have been sent.

Many have since returned to homelessness on the street, and some never truly left, as much of the recent fiasco with Charles Woodward demonstrated.

One of the more grotesque features of the way We Heart Seattle operates is the frequent posting of pictures of them and their residences all over their public Facebook group.

For instance:

• Andrea Suarez frequently refers to the meager tents occupied by the unhoused as tent mansions, as if there is anything luxurious about living in them, and gets up in arms when any individual person may occupy more than one tent.
• Suarez believes that bed bugs are no big deal and not a legitimate “excuse” for unhoused folks to decline her help with placement into congregate shelters, which are widely known to be infested with them.

These are but a few of a myriad of examples we could point to, as the heinous things that come out of Suarez’s mouth are unending, and she has only grown bolder in her expression of them as time has gone by.

This insensitivity is representative of her entire approach to working with the unhoused. However, it is her willful failure to listen to, and learn from feedback that demonstrates to us with the most sobering clarity that she’s here to serve her own agenda rather than truly help anyone in need.

Some examples:

• Despite many surveys and studies demonstrating that a majority of the city’s unhoused population were residents of the city prior to becoming homeless, Suarez continues to perpetuate a falsehood that most of them come to the city from other states in order to prosper from its leniency and generous benefits for the unhoused.
• Suarez claims that 100% of the unhoused population are addicts, which we know to be categorically untrue.

Seattle has one of the most severe homelessness crises in the nation, and spreading falsehoods such as these is only harmful to our ability to form the collective understanding necessary in order to address the issue and prevent future homelessness.

Not being a qualified case manager didn’t stop Andrea Suarez from impersonating one in order to gain access to someone at a youth shelter.

There are multiple documented instances in which she has falsely represented herself or her relationships, primarily with government officials, for her own benefit. This is all kinds of illegal, and many Seattle city government officials will have nothing to do with her because of it.

Andrea Suarez isn’t shy about her perspective on this issue, and can frequently be heard stating things that are consistent with the common false belief that homeless people don’t have jobs.

She made her debut in the fall of 2020 by verbally abusing mutual aid volunteers who had organized a hamburger cookout at a local park. She called them enablers and insisted that the unhoused should be required to pick up trash before they are given something to eat.

One of the volunteers wrote email to Suarez following the event to give her a piece of their mind and received this in reply.

Holding people accountable and empowering them to do something is giving them a hand up, not a hand out. We train dogs, we parent toddlers, and there is no reason we cannot expect the homeless, addicted or mentally ill to be challenged more to contribute something.

Suarez claims that folks are twisting her words and making a big deal out of nothing, but you’ll have to decide that for yourself.

More recently, she was up in arms via email to various city government officials over the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s provision of $25 stipends to unhoused individuals without requiring them to pick up garbage.