Nonprofit leader (and Spokane’s resident Hobbit) Ryan Oelrich solves the region’s biggest puzzles with a touch of whimsy
Ryan Oelrich discovered the power of staying behind the scenes at an early age.
As a kid, his first taste of performance was in puppeteering. Oelrich was recovering from a highly traumatic childhood experience, and there was something comforting about disappearing behind the puppet stage’s curtains and letting his characters be the ones to bring joy to the audience.
When he discovered stage magic, Oelrich was amazed by the tricks of the trade and pursued that as his next foray into the arts. But he was disillusioned by the way most magicians, despite getting all the credit, seemed to do less than half of the work. Once again, he slipped behind the scenes.
“I had assistants, but I thought it was unfair that they did all the work, while magicians mostly twirl around on stage,” Oelrich said. “I wanted to be the one being sawn in half and manipulating my body into tiny spaces and so I did that, and the show was better for it.”
These days, Oelrich still does his best work backstage. As executive director of Priority Spokane, a local nonprofit striving to solve the Inland Northwest’s most pressing issues in tangible, data-backed ways, Oelrich is a quiet force of nature linking people together in service of a noble cause. And even when the work feels like it’s sawing him in half, he hasn’t let that old sparkle of magic get dull.
» Fitting the pieces together
When he started college, Oelrich had planned for a career in psychology. A natural problem solver, he wanted to learn what he could do to repair the human brain’s myriad short circuits. He later changed tracks to marketing and public relations, but he hadn’t even finished his degree at Gonzaga yet when life pulled a magic trick on him. A benefactor, seeing a need for better support systems for Spokane’s youth and a talent for organizing in Oelrich, offered Oelrich the funds to start a nonprofit.
It wasn’t the path he’d envisioned, but Oelrich quickly found that nonprofit work was a perfect match for his natural puzzle-solving skills and his heart for service.
“I’ve always had a heart for the underdog,” Oelrich said. “I’ve been the underdog myself, so I at that time definitely recognized that population, myself included, were overlooked and underserved and that we could do more.”
As Oelrich continued to work for those underdogs and expanded the communities he served, he saw a growing need for the service-minded to collaborate and pool their resources rather than competing for scarce money, time and attention. When he got the opportunity to lead Priority Spokane, Oelrich saw something special.
Rather than dedicating itself entirely to one specific cause, Priority Spokane picks one pressing issue — its namesake priority — using a data-driven approach that includes regional stakeholders from local Indigenous tribes to city government, faith communities and utility corporations. For the following years, Oelrich and his community partners dedicate themselves to systematic change until they feel they’ve accomplished all they can.
The collaborative approach has proven strikingly effective. Starting in 2009, the group set its sights on improving graduation rates for Spokane County high school students. Teams led by Oelrich developed community-based strategies to address the problem’s root causes for five years, collecting data and adjusting to fit all along the way, and by 2013, graduation rates had risen over 20 percent.
That success won Priority Spokane a Culture of Health Prize from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, but there was always more work to be done. The group started working to address family and youth homelessness, then pivoted to their current priority of addressing domestic violence and trauma and their impact on Spokane County youth in 2019, garnering national recognition and community support all along the way.
Oelrich is quick to point out that he is merely one in a sea of caring people and institutions working together to serve Spokane. But without his boundless enthusiasm for the cause and his ability to seamlessly connect like-minded people, Priority Spokane and his other service projects could never have made the waves they have, according to friend and colleague Sara Clements-Sampson.
In her line of work as regional community health investment manager for the Providence network of nonprofit hospitals, Clements-Sampson has worked with countless charity groups and nonprofit executives over the years. She knew when Oelrich joined Priority Spokane that his innate talent for the behind-the-scenes work would bring his group’s goals so much closer to reality.
“He gets the right people at the table to really talk about these things, he’s gotten leaders who have not typically come to the table to sit down together,” Clements-Sampson said. “He makes a clear, conscious argument, and he’s so likable that you can’t really say no to it. He just kind of flies under the radar, but he gets it done.”
Oelrich is the kind of person who truly throws himself into whatever he does, Clements-Sampson said, and the two often find themselves talking a lot of shop even when they hang out off the clock. Oelrich admits that he’s occasionally burned out — there are simply too many giant problems to address, and even with an army of collaborators, he doesn’t think he’ll ever run out of puzzles to solve. But when the puzzle pieces begin to stack up, Oelrich has always been able to find that glimmer of magic.
» Behind-the-scenes magic
At the home Oelrich shares with his husband, Robert, overlooking Spokane’s Peaceful Valley, there is magic and joy to be found in every corner. Though Halloween is nearly a month away, the house is bedecked in jack o’lanterns, candy-corn-colored streamers and grinning witches; the couple welcomes trick or treaters starting Oct. 1. And tucked away in a quiet corner of their cul-de-sac, there is a little round red door leading to one of Oelrich’s most magical projects to date: Spokane End, a real-life Hobbit house inspired by the Lord of the Rings series’s diminutive cottage-dwellers.
Inside, though you have to stoop under Hobbit-height rafters, it’s a pocket of stillness and serenity. Oelrich and his husband built Spokane End from scratch, providing Oelrich a place to recharge his batteries after he’d thrown himself wholly into Priority Spokane’s homelessness project a couple of years back.
“The Hobbit house was my sanity,” Oelrich said. “It was where I could just take a break, forget about everything and just throw myself into making sure that the plants over the roof would stay alive and engineering a round doorway.”
But as with everything Oelrich does, there is room for community. Another round portal at the back of the Hobbit house opens onto a “secret courtyard,” as Oelrich calls it, where he hosts gatherings of collaborators and friends to solve problems over hot chocolate and a crackling fire. The house draws visitors from all around Spokane and beyond, occasionally bringing several thousand candy seekers to the quiet neighborhood for Spokane End’s annual Halloween event.
It’s a place for rest and reflection, but Oelrich’s magic has always been magnetic.
“When I started building I had a few ideas about how this could be more than just something for me,” Oelrich said. “I thought you know what, this is my journey. This is important, but I’ll invite people to come along, if they want to go on this crazy journey with me. And I think I was a little surprised by the number of people that wanted to go on that same journey with me, but what is a Hobbit house if not a place to start a journey?” N
By Riley Haun
Photography By Joel Riner
As Featured In: Winter/Spring 2022