After months of delays and community pushback, a contract to allow the Denver Dream Center to take over the Globeville Recreation Center was denied by Denver City Council — leaving the building empty for yet another lengthy period.
The space has been vacant since November, when Birdseed Collective, another local nonprofit with long ties to the neighborhood, was forced to vacate the building on short notice by Denver Parks and Recreation.
For over a decade, Birdseed had offered a variety of services, like a food pantry, community craft nights and more.
The decision to force out Birdseed and bring in the Denver Dream Center was controversial. While Birdseed was able to find a new space just up the road from the rec center, neighbors said the rec center location had been convenient and that Birdseed stewarded the space well.
Meanwhile, several elected officials skewered parks leadership for Birdseed’s displacement, in addition to a series of other controversial decisions that led director Jolon Clark to promise better communication.
The city council rejected the new contractor, leaving the space empty.
Bryan “Pastor B” Sederwall, the Denver Dream Center’s CEO and founder, had promised to run a youth center at the Globeville Rec Center.
The service organization has worked with youth, people exiting prison and people in homelessness since 2006. While city officials said the center would reopen by January, the contract wasn’t presented to City Council until April.
The Dream Center describes itself as a church, rather than a regulated nonprofit.
During a two-hour hearing on Monday, Denver City Council heard more about the contract from city staff, while residents complained that they had been excluded from the process.
“Why are community-based culturally rooted organizations being overlooked?” Marcus Weaver asked during public comment.
As part of the contract, the Denver Dream Center would have paid the city $90,000 over three years for use of the Globeville Rec Center. The rec center would have been open seven days a week for 95 hours total, with scheduled activities and programs.
Some council members questioned whether the Dream Center could live up to its promises. Councilmember Sarah Parady brought up contracts awarded to the Dream Center by the city’s Crime Prevention and Control Commission and Caring for Denver, a taxpayer-funded foundation. She asked whether the nonprofit met the terms of those contracts.
“There was a concern … about reporting not having been received from the Dream Center for those contracts,” she said.
A March report by the Denver Auditor found that the Dream Center did not submit quarterly reports as part of its crime prevention grant.
The Dream Center has worked to expand beyond its original scope of food distribution and outreach. In recent years, it received grants to launch a behavioral health counseling service and post-incarceration support.
A CPR News investigation of the city’s Caring for Denver grantees could not find a clinician licensed in Colorado who worked for Sederwall and the Denver Dream Center. His staff said they had a clinical director, but offered a name that was not found among licensed practitioners in the state.
Sederwall said they eventually used tax money they received from Denver to contract with a company to provide behavioral health services, but the company Sederwall named never responded to CPR's requests for confirmation. Caring for Denver leadership said they were disappointed by the Dream Center's performance.
At Monday’s hearing, Sederwall again doubled down on having a licensed clinician and said “information relayed to the news wasn't 100% accurate.”
Sederwall told Denverite the auditor and CPR reports painted his organization in a bad light.
“All of that is open and it is transparent. Anybody can come and see where the dollars went, where the clinician was, and there's pretty significant numbers that we've tracked,” he said.
DPR Director Clark said that a review of the Dream Center’s previous work for the city was not part of the process.
Ultimately, the contract was voted down.
Several council members asked pointed questions about the decision to not renew the contract for the previous operator, Birdseed Collective. While a parks lawyer said there was an option to extend Birdseed’s contract by a year, Clark said he was unaware of such an option.
Council President Amanda Sandoval criticized the city’s process for finding a new contractor. When the department recently asked for contract proposals, it used the same parameters it set in 2017, without changing it or going through a community process.
“Why would a 2017 RFP go out today in modern time when it's after COVID, things are virtual, everything's changed. I just don't understand how that decision was made,” she said.
The decision to issue a request for proposals without community input came from Parks and Recreation Deputy Executive Director John Martinez, who apologized for the error.
“I dropped the ball on that and I take full accountability,” he told council members. “I was going off [the 2017 request for proposals] when we did a very robust community engagement process and the scope of work was still relevant to what we were looking for in a traditional rec center.”
But he defended the decision to issue an identical RFP, noting that “a lot of the stuff that's in the RFP is what we want to see in our traditional rec center.”
Ultimately, eight council members voted against the contract. Several cited the decision to award the contract to the Dream Center without community involvement as their reasoning.
Councilman Darrell Watson, who represents Globeville, was among the three yes votes. He urged his fellow members to support the contract, but ultimately failed.
“Four months with that center being closed, four months of no activity, four months of really that heart not being there,” he said. (Council members Chris Hinds and Paul Kashmann were absent.)
Martinez, of DPR, said the contract failing means the department has to go back to “square one” and issue a new request for proposals — this time with a community engagement process.
"We're looking at a six-month period and that building will sit vacant,” he said.
Sederwall said he hasn’t decided whether he’ll throw the Dream Center’s hat in the ring when DPR reopens the request for proposals.
CPR’s Ben Markus contributed reporting.
