Travel teaches many lessons, and for famous American travel writer Rick Steves, one of those is that “Love thy neighbor” need not depend on proximity.
The biblical phrase has been on Steves’ mind of late, following his philanthropic rescue of a community hygiene center where those struggling to provide a basic living for themselves could come and shower or wash their clothes.
Reading in a local news outlet that the owner of the land on which it was built was planning to sell, the wildly successful author and presenter on PBS of “Rick Steves’ Europe” stepped up to buy.
“I vividly remember what it’s like as a kid backpacking around the world to need a shower,” Steves said at an event last week announcing the purchase. “This is a place that gives countless people that are down and out a shower.”
Even though Lynnwood Hygiene Center was two blocks from his own church, Steves never knew it was there. He read about it on the My Edmund News website, and how it went beyond only hygiene to provide heated spaces, meals, and a twice-monthly pop-up medical clinic.
Steves, who told the Washington Post that he’s reached a point of diminishing returns in consuming for his own pleasure, got in touch with the landowner through My Edmund News, and quickly posted an offer of $2.25 million that was quickly accepted.
Meanwhile, the stressed-out executive director of Lynnwood Center, Sandra Mears, had been searching for weeks among local Pacific Northwest donors, non-profits, and philanthropists to try and find some kind of solution.
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Her organization had a no-cost, no-commitment lease on the land which was coming up. She had tried to find donors that might help fund a land purchase, or motels and other locations that she could use to transfer the Lynnwood Center to, even briefly.
Then one morning she got an email from Rick Steves, whom she’d never heard of. Having gotten used to ‘nos,’ this faceless name said he had bought the land for her operation.
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Mears was able to cancel the goodbye party, and instead hold a “joyful” event with Steves as a keynote speaker, where he announced that a private donor had contributed another quarter-million dollars for expansion and renovation work to add more showers and a community area for residents to socialize.
“This [center] was going to shut down. It would be vacated right now. It would empty for this Christmas,” Steves told the Post. “Love thy neighbor has nothing to do with proximity, that’s a lesson I’ve learned as a traveler.”
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