by David Mendez

After more than 50 years serving seniors in Shoreline and Lake Forest Park, the community’s local senior center recently underwent a makeover, unveiling a new logo and a new name.

Local leaders formally unveiled the newly-dubbed Shoreline Senior Center on Tuesday, Sept. 22, in a ribbon cutting ceremony replete with laughter and traditionally-oversized scissors. The ceremony celebrates the senior center’s new independence after decoupling from Sound Generations, its former parent organization. It also marks a new, much shorter, name for the center.

“It was always the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center. Then we changed it to the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Activity Center, with an emphasis on activity” during the height of the COVID pandemic, SSC Board Vice President Maryn Wynne told The Osprey. “So then we’ve got this name that’s 10 miles long…we just decided to shorten that down.”

Lake Forest Park seniors are still welcome, she said, as are all seniors — this change just makes it less of a mouthful.

Last November, word began to circulate that the senior center would go independent as part of Sound Generations’ new strategic plan. Sound Generations has shifted away from managing senior centers across western Washington, instead focusing on delivering community services.

“We still have a wonderful working relationship,” said Shoreline Senior Center Executive Director Emily Jones. “Our community dining is by Sound Generations, Meals on Wheels is one of their programs, and the Hyde Shuttle, all of that.”

What’s gone away is Sound Generations’ back office support and accounting — and its administrative overhead. “It gives us more independence in terms of deciding how we want to operate the center, the kind of programs that we want to offer, and then also just to be able to make more decisions, more independently, in terms of the future of the center.”

The transition, Jones said, came faster than anyone expected.

“I had been warned by everybody that it’s been taking the IRS anywhere from 10 to 12 months to approve 501(c)3 applications,” Jones said. Instead, the organization got its approval letter within weeks, Wynne said. The rapid approval was a gift for the senior center, allowing the center to immediately begin working to raising funds.

“It’s a really critical thing for an organiztion to have so we can solicit donations and manage grants,” Wynne said.

It also means that the Shoreline Senior Center is legally an independent entity, able to make its own decisions and chart its own path forward. Now, Wynne said, the center is “responsible for its own steps.”

That allows the senior center to host its own fundraisers, like its regular Rainbow Bingo and Trivia Night programs. It’s left room for new traditions, like the 2026 Shoreline Chocolate Festival, the first annual event that offers attendees tastes of treats from seven of the Seattle area’s top chocolatiers. The list includes Lake Forest Park’s Chocolate Man, Bothell’s Bon Chocolats, Greenwood’s Cocoa Legato and more. (Tickets for that event are $25 for general admission, $20 for senior center members, and 100% of ticket sales raise funds for the senior center.)

It also lets the center maintain its current programing, like the Kapuna Hula dance group (which includes members that have danced together for more than 20 years), Tai Chi and a Death Cafe, a group allowing people to talk about death, dying and mortality — without the weight of mourning or grief — in a space that offers connection and discussion.

“It’s an interesting and open time, where you can talk about things that are very difficult to talk about in a warm, safe environment, to consider things that you might not have considered or thought about before,” Wynne said.

This newfound independence allows the Shoreline Senior Center to keep up what’s been working, while being more accountable to the folks who use it every day.

“We went from being almost like a program to being standalone,” Emily Jones said. “There’s been so much work by the board, by the staff, by volunteers supporting us. There’s no way one person could have done this, it was truly a labor of love.”