Updated Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at 10:30 a.m. and 12:20 p.m.
An understaffed hotline, two murders at a shelter hotel, and accusations of abuse at shelters have already cost The Salvation Army funding.
Now, Denver homelessness advocates say the city needs to cut ties with The Salvation Army altogether.
The charitable religious group, they argue, is failing people experiencing homelessness. The city, advocates say, needs to quit giving millions of dollars to an organization they claim is not keeping up its end of contracts with the city and is endangering people using its services.
The advocacy group Housekeys Action Network Denver held a protest outside Salvation Army headquarters on Tuesday afternoon, with a few dozen people attending.
“They are not fit to be a provider,” said Terese Howard, a member of HAND. “Their actions do not line up to meeting the community's needs.”
The Salvation Army, a church-based service group, is a major player in Denver’s homelessness strategy. The organization has received more than $13 million in city contracts since 2024 to operate shelters and provide services for unhoused people. And the city is standing by the organization and firing back at homeless advocates.
“We are a better city today for the efforts of The Salvation Army,” Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “The Salvation Army performs a difficult job at an extremely high level, and I know they are as committed to accountability and improvement as they are to our shared mission of ending unsheltered homelessness in Denver.”
An email from the mayor’s office to local press also criticized advocates for their tactics, saying that unnamed people had called The Salvation Army’s hotline hundreds of times a day to falsely create a sense that it was overloaded — a charge advocates strongly rejected.
“That is called lying in order to deflect the reality,” Howard said. “And it is a serious dismissal of houseless families who are in [expletive] crisis calling hundreds of times. That is insane.”
A Denverite investigation demonstrated that the hotline has been overloaded, that it explicitly asked people to hang up and call back, and that only one person is tasked with returning calls. Sometimes as many as 40 calls come in within one hour. (The hotline's voicemail message was updated in March, asking people to leave a message instead of calling repeatedly.)
During cold weather emergencies, some families could not get inside an emergency shelter, as nobody answered their calls. The Salvation Army’s hotline, known as the Connection Center, is the sole path into emergency shelter for families in the city of Denver.
At its peak, the Connection Center had 410 households on a waitlist for homeless shelters. Bringing those people inside takes around six weeks.
HAND accused the organization of mishandling its mission.
The advocates’ accusations range from security failures to poor maintenance and hiring practices.
HAND alleges The Salvation Army has:
- Failed to prevent two murders in a shelter at a former DoubleTree hotel.
- Failed to provide running water at multiple shelters.
- Arbitrarily kicked families and individuals out of shelters.
- Hired a worker with an extensive criminal history who sexually assaulted a shelter guest.
- Mismanaged the Connection Center.
- Allowed rodent and bedbug infestations to go unchecked at the Crossroads shelter.
When people experiencing homelessness recently filed a class-action discrimination case against the city of Denver, they also accused The Salvation Army of failing to provide legally mandated, accessible services at city-funded shelters. (The Salvation Army is not a defendant in that lawsuit, however.)
Billy Johnson, a Salvation Army employee with a long criminal history, was also arrested in March for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman at one of the organization’s shelters. A spokesperson told 9News the organization had conducted a background check that did not show he had committed crimes within a seven-year limit.
A spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office told Denverite some of the concerns are valid. Various city departments will be conducting regular unannounced checks to ensure the shelters are operating up to the city’s standards.
The Salvation Army has stressed that it has only limited resources and that it was trying to improve safety at its facilities.
“The Salvation Army has served Denver for more than 150 years, and we look forward to serving for 150 more,” said Division Commander Major Nesan Kistan, the organization’s top local official, in a written statement. “The safety and wellbeing of those in our care will always be our top priority as we continue to work with the City and County of Denver to better lives, protect families, and ensure no one has to sleep on the street.”
There have been times the water has been turned off for maintenance, but bottled water and shower trucks were provided, spokesperson Jennifer Forker said.
Nobody is kicked out “arbitrarily,” she added. When individuals are ejected from the shelter, there have been violations of the rules that guests agreed to before coming inside. Guests have multiple opportunities to correct their behavior unless there is violence or another egregious circumstance.
“Agreements are written, signed and when necessary verbally read aloud and issued in Spanish,” Forker said.
All the shelters have exterminators addressing rodents and bedbugs. At Crossroads, one of the largest shelters the Salvation Army operates, exterminators come in weekly.
The problems with the Connection Center have nothing to do with mismanagement, she said. The Connection Center does not have enough resources and the staff are overwhelmed. Those who do work the hotline are passionate about their work and care deeply about the families they support.
“It is so easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize,” Forker said. “It is so hard to do this work. Our frontline people are disheartened. They work so hard caring for families, caring for people.”
Lawmakers, advocates and people experiencing homelessness have been raising concerns for years.
Councilmember Shontel Lewis has critiqued The Salvation Army for months, asking her fellow council members not to renew the group’s contracts. Among her concerns: The group denied her entry to inspect a shelter in her district.
Her criticism is having an effect. Last month, Denver City Council rejected a $3 million contract to pay for “rapid rehousing” to 50 families experiencing homelessness on a 10-1 vote.
“There's no reason to approve additional dollars when they have shown that they are not able to keep our communities safe and that they're not willing to be accountable to the safety of our communities,” Lewis said.
At the time, The Salvation Army defended its work and said it was not concerned about the state of its relationship with the city.
Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect that the Connection Center's voicemail message was recently changed and to add additional comment from the Salvation Army.
