Leadership Updates - Housing Hope

With 2025 fully in swing, we wanted to take a moment to update everyone of some of the leadership changes that are happening at Housing Hope and HopeWorks. Our goal with any change is to strengthen our agency to better serve our residents, staff, community partners, and donors. While "change" can be a synonym of uncertainty at times, we fully believe that these leadership changes are the correct adjustments for our nonprofit's continued mission of facilitating affordable housing, job training programs, and childcare to Snohomish County.

Meet Our New Interim Chief Executive Officer - Kathryn Opina

The Housing Hope Executive Board announced the appointment of senior administrator Kathryn Opina as Interim Chief Executive Officer for Housing Hope and HopeWorks on March 12, 2025. Ms. Opina has served the organization as the lead operations and general administrator for the last two years. She worked under Donna Moulton, the former CEO, who left the organization at the end of February to attend to family matters in Florida.

Ms. Opina came to the agency with significant non-profit fiscal and operations experience. She has over a decade of administrative, programmatic, and property management experience with the Salvation Army. The Interim CEO reports to and collaborates with the Board of Directors to provide leadership continuity for Housing Hope and its subsidiaries, including Housing Hope Properties and HopeWorks Social Enterprises Agency. She will serve in this role as the Executive Board commences a search for a permanent CEO.

“The Executive Board has expressed their confidence and support of Ms. Opina to be in this important transitional interim role. She and the rest of the Strategic Leadership Team have a proven record of collaboration and mission-centered focus,” said the Executive Board Chair, Kirby Duncan. “We look forward to working with the entire team as we prepare for the next chapter of executive agency leadership.”

Media interviews with Ms. Opina are available upon request. Please contact Joan Penney at joanpenney@housinghope.org for more information. Direct emails to Ms. Opina can be sent to kathrynopina@housinghope.org

Say Hello To The Strategic Leadership Team (SLT)

When word of Donna's departure was made official to leadership, the Strategic Leadership Team, existing of our most senior directors, started to manage the day-to-day operations, and future work of the agency at large.

The Strategic Leadership Team is comprised of Rachel Downes (Sr. Director of Strategic Initiatives and Collaborations), Joan Penney (Sr. Director of Resource Development, Marketing, Communications), Chris Doyle (Sr. Director of Human Resources and Operations), and Patrick Tweedt (Director of Finance. This team also included our new Interim CEO, Kathryn Opina, before her promotion to said position.

The SLT has been working diligently behind the scenes, alongside our Interim CEO and the Executive Committee of the Board to facilitate a seamless transition while also tackling some of the most pressing challenges facing our organization, and the affordable housing world at large. This team has demonstrated time and time again their abilities to steer our ship in the right direction and tackle challenges and any critiques head one. Transparency, communication, and empathetic professionalism have defined their first few months, and speak into the confidence our organization has in them to keep hope alive in Snohomish County.