It’s been more than a year since the Blaine Senior Center underwent major restructuring after the City Council transferred management of the facility from the center’s nonprofit to the Blaine-Birch Bay Parks and Recreation District 2 in April 2025.
After the council’s vote, longtime member and current board President Kelle Rankin-Sunter said that members felt unsettled about the center, whose future seemed up in the air.
“There was a lot of uncertainty,” Rankin-Sunter said. “There was a feeling around the center that when parks and recreation took over, everything was going to change. (That) they were going to shut everything down, close the entire operation and kick the seniors out. That was never going to happen.”
The city of Blaine owns the community center, located at 763 G St., and the adjacent pavilion. The building is rented under the city’s facilities and open spaces policy.
The past two years have been rocky for the senior center.
In November 2024, then-Executive Director Pete Nelson resigned, causing an ensuing popular vote by senior center members to oust various board members and months of uncertainty afterward. In response, the city awarded future management of the senior center to parks and recreation, citing leadership ability and safety, according to previous reporting by The Northern Light.
While that caused a major upheaval in how the senior center was organized and managed, it hasn’t caused major changes in the day-to-day experience of members, Rankin-Sunter said.
“In so many ways, nothing has changed,” Rankin-Sunter said. “The average person, if they stopped coming to the senior center four years ago and they walked in the door right now, they would not recognize it as being significantly different. I think that’s a credit to how it’s been transferred.”
But a lot has changed behind the scenes.
The Blaine Senior Center nonprofit is no more; now renamed the Blaine-Birch Bay Seniors Association to reflect a new mission to serve not only members at the center, but senior citizens around the community.
“A lot of people think we’ve just vanished,” Rankin-Sunter said of some members’ perception of the nonprofit. “They think we’ve disappeared.”
The new nonprofit board, elected in December, had the immediate task of rewriting its outdated bylaws from scratch, which Rankin-Sunter said took six months of weekly meetings to finally ratify in June.
The newly reorganized nonprofit will operate more like a “Friends of” advocacy organization, helping with fundraising, donations, special events, community outreach, and other things that a government organization like parks and recreation cannot do.
That transition period, both hashing out the minute details of creating a new nonprofit organization and keeping senior center members engaged in the countless events that the center puts on day in and day out, took work from both the old guard and the new, Rankin-Sunter said.
“In those first days, we were still in the throes of figuring out what we’re going to do when we grow up,” Rankin-Sunter said. “There was a lot of upheaval in the whole process of the city changing who was managing the Blaine Senior Center, and what that was going to mean for the old Blaine Senior Center nonprofit.”
Rankin-Sunter specifically thanked three board members who stayed on from the previous iteration of the nonprofit to help through the transition: Sieneke Stevenson, Glenn Brisken and Sue Cushman.
Those three, Rankin-Sunter said, dedicated hundreds of hours through the past year to making sure this transition would go smoothly, and all three left their roles in May.
Rankin-Sunter said services for members have stayed roughly the same through the management change, and the new nonprofit has already made meaningful impacts, including purchasing $15,000 in new dining equipment, putting on more bingo and raffle nights, and facilitating more field trips around the region, from La Conner to downtown Bellingham’s farmers market.
The next big event for the new Blaine-Birch Bay Seniors Association?
Being honored by the Bellingham Bells on Monday for its Community Champions night. The honor includes tickets to the game for volunteers and some members (first pitch at 6:35 p.m. at Joe Martin Stadium), an informational booth at the stadium and a $2,000 donation from the team.
Elections for the next board are set for September, and members or prospective seniors looking to learn more can reach out to 360-441-2868 or via email at board@bbbseniors.org.
