Every Wednesday, Cody Kiebler heads into downtown Denver, hoping to help people who live outside.
He usually joins a caravan of outreach workers, each bringing their own specialty. Solving homelessness takes a “Rembrandt painting” worth of colors, he said. He represents one color, one function in all this work — mostly talking to people and helping them find their way to a case manager.
“I can only be who I am, and I need other resources to be who they are to complete the painting,” he said.
So, he was disappointed to learn that the city’s palette of services shrank in recent weeks.
The Denver AID Center, a drop-in resource center at 14th Avenue and Elati Street, recently closed. Its leader, Carlon Manuel, lost his job in city layoffs.
Kiebler was particularly shocked because he had been directing people to the AID Center that morning. Where would he send people now?
“That was a lot of support for us on the street,” Kiebler said. “We can't all do it all.”
The building has been mostly empty since its leadership was laid off mid-August, though nonprofits have been allowed to access items they had stored inside. Jon Ewing, a spokesperson for Mayor Mike Johnston’s office, said it will completely close this Friday, Sept. 5.
The AID Center has been on the ropes for months.
The center offered an array of services for people living on the streets. They could get free phones, dental screenings, Medicaid enrollment, connections to addiction treatment and more.
But the city only employed a handful of people there, and they were mostly in charge of managing the space. Most of the outreach work was done, instead, by nonprofits and government agencies. Advocates said the shared space benefitted all the providers. The center’s building is across the street from Denver’s jail and centrally located.
Back in June, the center’s staff and partners received word that the city was planning to shut it down due to new budget constraints. The Mayor’s Office of Social Equity and Innovation, which oversaw the operation, gave six days’ notice, setting off criticism and concern from people who work on homelessness and relied on the space.
“It's very difficult to articulate how much of a central place that has become for our clients, our community, and our office,” Colette Tvedt, Denver’s chief public defender, said at the time.
The city heard those complaints and, just days later, announced the closure would be postponed.
Then, in August, the layoffs began and Manuel, the AID Center’s director, was among those on the chopping block.
“It is an absolute travesty,” he said this week of the closure.
Manuel claimed the center was “the most cost-efficient delivery of services to the city.”
"It tells me that the leadership is incompetent,” he added. “There's something woefully wrong with your judgment, that you would close the place that has all these services provided for free.”
Local nonprofits are preparing to fill the void.
Jon Ewing, Mayor Johnston’s spokesperson, said the closure was a “difficult but necessary decision,” spurred by both Denver’s budget crisis and Jonhston’s work on homelessness over the last two years.
“While it has been a valuable and safe space for people experiencing homelessness, the AID Center has been supplanted by other programs like the city’s All In Mile High effort, which provides more consistent and holistic access to resources,” he wrote in a statement. “Though the AID Center is going away, services are not. The city has spent the last several weeks working with local providers and partners to ensure the same assistance is offered and that needs are being met.”
People who need help, he added, should now go look for it at local nonprofits like the Second Chance Center, Denver Dream Center or the Gathering Place. Ewing also said officials are now eyeing a new use for the AID Center’s old building.
Bryan Sederwall, the head of the Denver Dream Center, said his organization is ready to take on some of this work. Like the AID Center, his Dream Center is open for walk-ins five days a week.
“The AID Center has been a great resource to a lot of people, and so our heart and passion is always to pick up whatever we can to be an expanded service provider, and we do our best with what we've got,” said Sederwall, better known as “Pastor B.”
But Sederwall added this is a tough moment for anyone working in housing and homelessness.
“We're obviously going to do our best. Nonprofit dollars are tight because, for everyone … the city budget is tight. That makes it a little bit tough from just a capacity perspective,” he said.
Ewing said officials have been working to inform all of Denver’s many outreach teams about the changes. Still, it’s taken time for word to get around; Manuel said people have continued to show up at the AID Center, looking for resources.
