The woman was filled with fury when she walked in the Westwood Recreation Center looking for help. For days, she had wandered the streets of the southwest Denver neighborhood, unsure where to sleep or how to get food.
She had recently lost her restaurant job, and then her apartment because she couldn’t pay the rent.
Her anger faded and tears began to flow down her face after Mindy Sandoval, a resource specialist strategically placed near the rec center’s front doors, asked the middle-aged woman how she could help.
“That’s got to be so scary to be older like that … and she’s also not experienced homelessness at all in all of her life, and she’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, what do I do now?’” Sandoval said.
“She was immediately evicted because she was living paycheck to paycheck, and now she’s on the streets and has nowhere to go, doesn’t know where to get food, nothing. It’s all brand new to her. She’s wandering around this neighborhood because that’s all she knows.”
Sandoval, who was stationed at a new help desk run by the nonprofit Elevated Denver, told the woman about the Gathering Place, a day shelter that could set her up with housing for domestic violence survivors. She also sent her to get a hot meal at SAME, a nearby cafe that stands for So All May Eat. By the time they finished talking, the woman, who “came in hot” because she was expecting another letdown, let her guard down and accepted the help.
This is what Elevated Denver had envisioned when it set out to open the neighborhood connection hub: a way to help people who had recently lost their housing or who were on the verge of losing their housing before they became entrenched.
They chose the Westwood neighborhood for the pilot project because of its high eviction rates and larger number of residents who need food assistance. They chose the recreation center, where signs are posted in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, because it would catch people who are coming to take a fitness class or drop off a library book in the tiny Denver Public Library branch.
“Community members come in to drop off their kids for art, for abuelas to come on Friday morning and take Zumba classes together, and that’s the loudest activity in this entire place,” said Liane Morrison, chief of strategy and impact at Elevated Denver. “It’s a very happy place. It’s just that kind of dynamism that’s really critical so that someone can feel like, ‘Oh, if I sent a neighbor there, it wouldn’t be glaring that they have a problem.’”
First 90 days are key
The hub opened in June and so far has helped more than 40 people in person, most of whom came into the rec center for some other reason. Even more people have called and texted the hub’s resource specialists, who spent weeks earlier this summer spreading out flyers all over the neighborhood.
Both Sandoval and the other resource specialist, Noemi Enriquez, grew up in Westwood. And Hamilton Nickoloff, a certified peer specialist, helps them come up with the best ways to advise people who just found themselves on the streets — he knows because he has been out there.
Nickoloff, now nine years sober, lived on and off in shelters and outside when he was dealing with addiction.
The first 90 days after becoming homeless are critical because people are more likely during that period to get help and avoid slipping into chronic homelessness, which is defined as a year without housing. But it’s hard to find the right help, Nickoloff knows from experience, when you’re worried about just surviving the night.
It isn’t until you haven’t showered for three weeks and you haven’t eaten a good meal in three weeks … that that sense of true desperation kicks in.
— Hamilton Nickoloff, peer specialist
“It is a scary time,” he said. “It’s a scary place to go to an encampment and say, ‘Hey, I’m without a house. Can somebody put me up?’ There’s a lot of risks involved in that. For the first two to three weeks, it’s almost like you’re frozen in place. There is no progress. And it isn’t until you haven’t showered for three weeks and you haven’t eaten a good meal in three weeks, and the depression is kicking in as the shock is wearing off, that that sense of true desperation kicks in.”
The community on the streets helps each other — people tell each other where to get a sandwich and a shower. But people who are newly homeless feel a sense that they are not like the others, that they are not part of that community and don’t want to be, Nickoloff said. That can make it even harder to find help.
At the hub, the goal is to provide people with accurate information, and to treat them like friends and neighbors instead of clients or numbers.
It was an idea that originated from Elevated Denver’s three-month brainstorming session that included people who had been homeless, business leaders, government employees and nonprofits. Beginning in 2022, Elevated Hub began a series of podcasts in which they interviewed experts and people who had lived on the streets. Separate from the podcast, the nonprofit also spent hours interviewing 40 people who were homeless.
“It was very clear that the resource list that they were given, the links, the phone numbers were often wrong, the hours had changed,” Morrison said. “They made a trip across town and that agency no longer exists. Or they don’t provide that anymore. Or they only have funding at the beginning of the month, and now it’s the end, so you have to wait three weeks. You’re not in line at the right time.”
The hub’s resource list is well-researched and constantly evolving. The resource specialists call the child care center across the street to make sure they are taking child care assistance before sending over a mother who is struggling to keep her job because she has no one to watch her kids. They call the food banks to get their updated hours. They know which organization provides eye glasses to people who can’t afford them.
The hub is open on weekends and some evenings until 7:30 p.m. That’s because Elevated Denver heard too many frustrating stories about the result of government agencies or nonprofits closing at 4 or 5 p.m.
Elevated Denver received only enough donations to keep the hub operating for six months and has struggled to raise more money, said Johnna Flood, the nonprofit’s CEO. It would cost an estimated $155,000 to operate the hub for a year, and Elevated Denver has raised a bit more than half of that.
“Frankly, we have been challenged to find other grant support,” Flood said. “People in the neighborhood wanted us to come and felt like it was filling a gap, and that it would really be beneficial to be a connection point and help folks in the community.
“We think that’s a solvable problem.”
Neighbors helping neighbors
On a recent summer afternoon, a man walked into the rec center in Westwood to look for a food bank. He asked Sandoval, working at the hub, if she knew where to find one. But what Sandoval discovered after a bit of conversation was that she could do a lot more than just point him toward a food bank.
The man eventually explained that he had just gotten custody of his four grandchildren, who were moving in later that day. Meanwhile, his food stamps had just been stolen, he said, so he needed to find some food for the children.
By the time he walked out, the man had four school backpacks, which were available through another office in the rec center. He also had contact information for the state Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, a nonprofit that provides school clothes, and the Mi Casa Resource Center, which could help transform his car repair work into a viable business. He also left with directions to the food bank.
The help is anonymous. It’s in a building not associated with stigma. And it feels like a neighbor talking to a fellow Westwood resident, because it is.
“That’s a powerful tool, to be able to pull someone from that fear spot where they’re not necessarily able to process information as rapidly, and say, ‘There’s a chance. There’s hope,’” Nickoloff said. “Now, let’s say I got goals, that if I do this, this and this, I move in closer towards my end game. And that’s huge. And that’s a large part of what’s missing from organizations where when you walk in, you’re a number.”
