The Building Mill Creek Built From a Fallen Tree
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
What does it actually take to replace a food bank a windstorm destroyed? If you have driven past the lot behind Gold Creek Community Church anytime in the last year, you have probably wondered. There has been a fence, then a foundation, then something that looked less like a food bank and more like four shipping containers stacked and bolted together. On Saturday, September 19, two weeks from now, you get to see what all of it adds up to. The City of Mill Creek's own council calendar confirms the date: Hope Creek Charitable Foundation is cutting the ribbon on its new Mill Creek Community Food Bank building.
The short version of how it got here starts on February 25, 2025, when a windstorm dropped a tree straight through the food bank's main storage building and crushed one of the containers used for its Backpacks of Hope program. Executive Director Tom Sweeney described the scene to KING 5 the way you would describe watching something you built get taken apart in real time: the tree came down and crushed the container and the buildings on that side of the lot, and it was, in his word, devastating. Volunteers cleaned up the mess within hours. They kept serving clients from a tent parked next to the wreckage because, as Sweeney put it, people were still hungry no matter what happened to the roof over their heads.
Here is the part that should reframe how you think about this organization. A tree fell in February 2025. A new building opens its doors to the public in September 2026. That is roughly nineteen months from disaster to ribbon cutting, and almost none of that time was spent waiting on a grant committee or a capital campaign consultant.
Instead, the food bank ran a buy-a-brick campaign and put out the word that it needed help. By the time ground broke on August 4, 2025, 220 donors had raised a little over $200,000, including a $20,000 gift from the Mill Creek Rotary Club. Rotary Club president Tracey Kirkley told the crowd at the groundbreaking that the program, like the building itself, was about providing consistency, dignity and care where it is needed most. That is not a marketing line. It is the same building philosophy Sweeney had already described in plainer terms.
"If you're already down and out and now you're standing out in the freezing cold because you're hungry, if we can get them under a canopy, treat them with respect and give them the dignity they deserve, that's what I would want."
That quote matters because it explains a decision that might otherwise look strange: why rebuild bigger instead of just patching the damage. The food bank had already outgrown its three portables before the tree ever fell. The storm did not create the need for a larger building. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the old one still worked.
The new structure is not a conventional build, which is part of why it went up fast. Hope Creek's plan called for four 40-foot high-cube shipping containers arranged in two rows, each about 9 feet 6 inches tall, with an additional structure stacked on top adding another 9 feet of height. The finished footprint comes to 56 feet by 80 feet, with a 40-foot span between the two rows of containers and 14-foot doors on both the front and back to keep pallets and volunteers moving without a bottleneck.
Earlier this year, Hope Creek announced that occupancy had finally been approved, meaning distributions could happen under a roof instead of out of a tent for the first time since the storm. If you have ever wondered why a nonprofit build can move faster than it looks like it should on paper, this is the answer: skip the from-scratch construction timeline and start with containers that are already structurally sound.
Here is the part a ribbon cutting will not tell you. The building is occupied, but it is not finished. Hope Creek's own fundraising appeal, active as of this year, is asking for more than $100,000 to complete what it calls Phase Two: heating, insulation, plumbing and, as the organization put it, what everyone is most excited about, running water and a restroom. A grand opening with no working restroom is not a failure of planning. It is just what happens when you prioritize getting people out of the rain first and figuring out the rest of the building second.
That distinction is worth knowing before you show up Saturday expecting a finished facility. What you will actually see is a building doing its job while the last pieces get funded, which is arguably a more honest picture of how most community projects actually get built.
The ribbon cutting is not the only reason to pay attention to your calendar this month. The following morning, Sunday, September 20, at 9:00 a.m., the Run of the Mill 5K returns to the Mill Creek Town Center, with a course that runs along Main Street, out to North Creek, and back via the North Creek Trail. A Kids Run follows at 10:00 a.m. It is a fitting pairing: one day the community shows up to see what it built, the next day it shows up to run through the neighborhood that built it.
If a Saturday ribbon cutting and a Sunday 5K are more commitment than your weekend allows, there are lower-effort ways to help finish what Phase Two started:
The food bank's reach extends well past the Saturday storefront. The Backpacks of Hope program alone sends weekend meals home with roughly 500 students across 20 schools every Friday, and the organization has floated an upcoming workforce development effort called the Cup of Hope Coffee Cart, aimed at giving at-risk youth their first real job training. None of that shows up in a ribbon cutting photo. All of it is why the building matters more than the ceremony around it.
If you have lived in Mill Creek through this whole stretch, you have watched a nonprofit take a windstorm, a fence line, and a stack of shipping containers and turn them into a working grocery aisle in under two years. That is a story about this specific stretch of ground behind Gold Creek Community Church, and it is worth showing up for on its own terms.
I've spent fourteen years getting to know the corners of this community that don't show up on a listing sheet, from the trails people actually walk to the causes people actually show up for. If you are curious about what else makes a particular block or neighborhood here tick, or you just want to talk about where you might want to plant roots next, Jessica Gustelius would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
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