by David Mendez

Just after lunch on a windy winter Friday, only a handful of stragglers remained in Shoreline’s senior center. Larry Singer was among the last folks left from the day’s lunch, about to grab some dessert before heading home.

Singer’s a newcomer to the center — this is only his third visit, and he’s enjoyed his visits. He’s a recent widower after the death of Carol, his wife of 72 years, and he misses her dearly. She would have loved the programs and the people he’s met, he said. In the wake of her passing, this place has become part of his new community.

Which is why it upset him to hear that Shoreline’s senior center is facing existential change.

The Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Activity Center will go independent by the end of 2028, as its parent organization, Seattle-based senior services provider Sound Generations, works to get out of the business of running senior centers.

The Shoreline center, which provides visitors with meals, health services, fitness classes and educational presentations and workshops, is one of three King County senior centers that will be affected as Sound Generations realigns its model to focus exclusively on providing services.

“The friends that are made here — it’s just amazing,” Singer said, worried that the separation would lead to its closure, displacing the folks who rely on it. “It would be an awful loss.”

Word of the decision began circulating in mid-November. During a Nov. 17 Shoreline City Council meeting, Council Member John Ramsdell reported that the two entities would be “severing ties” in three years, per an announcement by a Sound Generations staffer at that day’s meeting of the North Urban Human Services Alliance.

“Senior services in our community are incredibly important,” said Sarah Arndt, NUHSA’s senior manager. “That senior activity center serves thousands of area seniors from Lake Forest Park, Edmonds, North Seattle and these are really vital services that they provide, so it’s going to be important that we as a community help them be creative and make connections, if possible, with another existing organization or whatever the options might be.”

The management change comes as Sound Generations prepares to release a three-year strategic plan that pulls away from running senior centers.

Currently, Sound Generations runs three senior centers in King County: the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center, the Ballard NW Senior Center and the Sno-Valley Senior Center in Snoqualmie in eastern King County. It acts as their central nervous system, providing information technologies, insurance management, accounting, grant management and human resources — when employees of those centers get paid, Sound Generations is effectively issuing the checks.

That central nervous system, the foundational back-office support, is what’s going away.

“We still support all of the senior centers in King County, and we’ll provide those services with these three senior centers,” said Sound Generations CEO Jim Wigfall, as he confirmed the planned changes. “We’re not ending our relationship with them, but we’re not providing back office support to them. One, we don’t think we’re that good at it. There are better, more cost-effective providers of those services that they can use and lower their costs and enable them to operate more effectively and efficiently.”

In other words, the senior centers and the people who manage them will be expected to stick around. Sound Generations employees — center directors and their immediate staff — would be transferred over to the newly-independent centers, Wigfall said.

Wigfall framed the change as Sound Generations refocusing on what it does best: delivering community services to senior centers and helping older adults where they are. That includes Meals on Wheels home delivery, hot community meals at community centers, transportation services, fitness and wellness training, senior rights assistance, caregiver support and information services.

Details for the transitions by the senior centers haven’t been finalized, Wigfall told The Osprey. It’s not the first time Sound Generations has separated from a senior center. About a decade ago, the Northshore Senior Center, with facilities in Bothell, Kenmore and Mill Creek went independent; last year, West Seattle’s Center for Active Living did the same. But those centers sparked their transitions on their own. This is the first time Sound Generations has initiated the process.

“We don’t have a playbook or anything already planned; we’re going to take it day by day and make sure we have a very thorough plan that makes this a very smooth transition,” Wigfall said.

NUHSA’s Sarah Arndt sees the challenges in front of the senior centers, especially Shoreline-Lake Forest Park. It doesn’t own the building; rather, the space is rented from the Shoreline School District — per a school board report, the center is set to pay about $74,000 in rent during the 2025-26 school year. It will have to source its own human resources and accounting support. And it’s going to have to build up fundraising and grant management as an independent entity amid an unstable economy.

“It’s not impossible, but it’s going to require some creative thinking and some partnerships,” Arndt said.

Currently, Sound Generations receives about $202,000 in funding from the City of Shoreline for senior services, including meal and transportation services. In July, the Shoreline City Council approved an 18-month, $145,000 contract with Sound Generations to provide mental health services at the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park center. Its tax filings have been managed by Sound Generations, in forms that combined data with the Ballard center.

On the bright side, the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center won’t be starting over from scratch. The center, which celebrated its 50th year in service in March and is older than the City of Shoreline itself, saw a record number of memberships in 2025: 1,216 as of November. The center has also served about 1,800 individual older adults, and had a total attendance of nearly 37,500 across all of its programs.

“They rely on us,” Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Senior Center executive director Emily Jones told The Osprey. She thought about one member who is fairly isolated in their apartment, not knowing anyone who lives around them. But they visit the senior center for classes, stick around for lunch, meet up with folks for coffee and hang around for a little while. Like Larry Singer, many folks are just looking for a place to meet new friends, as others have slipped away over the years. “At my age, most of my friends are gone,” Singer said. “You need to have something like this.”

“We’re a place where similar individuals, with similar life experience, similar medical histories, loss of family, loss of parents, all of those things that happen as we age, have a place to celebrate, or complain, or not talk about it and play bridge and get competitive about it,” Jones said. 

People don’t often realize that setting routines like that can be critical to social, emotional and physical health for adults as they age, said Allison Webel, associate dean in University of Washington’s Department of Child, Family and Population Health Nursing.

“Going to those centers, playing a game, going to a class, seeing friends, gives a lot of meaning to their day,” Webel said. “Meaning-making and finding purpose throughout the days are some of the hardest things for older adults.”

Building routines and staying socially active keeps minds sharp and open, ensuring that people can remain independent as they age, Webel said.

“The thing that we hear most often is that they didn’t realize that we had so much stuff to occupy them,” Jones said. “We offer a lot of things, and it’s because somebody asked for it. Whatever we have here, it’s because we know that it’s needed.”

The membership and service data prove that the Shoreline center is a much needed resource for the community, Jones said.

“It’s an investment in your community — for young people, it’s hard to see that far ahead,” she said. “We just celebrated our 50th anniversary in March, and we’re looking ahead for the next 50. The need for a senior center isn’t going to go away.”