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Government officials and nonprofit workers in Fremont County have been working with Community Solutions since October 2019 as part of the Built for Zero project, a framework created by Community Solutions to end homelessness across the country. Cañon City is located about an hour southwest of Colorado Springs and is home to several prisons, including the Colorado State Penitentiary, which provide jobs for many of the area s residents. Loaves and Fishes Ministries runs the county s only emergency homeless shelter, in Canon City, which has seventeen beds and is typically full every night. We applied just because we knew that we wanted to end homelessness and we knew that what we were doing wasn’t making the greatest impact. We needed help. We needed technical assistance. That’s what drove us to apply for it, says DeeDee Clement, executive director of Loaves and Fishes, which has a twenty-person staff. ....
“My senior year of high school, I found myself homeless, unhoused. I lived on the streets for an entire year. That just kind of gave me a heart and a passion for identifying, associating and connecting with people who find themselves in that predicament,” said Gilbert, whose family moved from Guyana to the U.S. Virgin Islands when he was young. After his stint on the streets, Gilbert served in the U.S. Air Force and later got an undergraduate degree in computer science. But being a pastor was his calling, and he established Restoration Christian Fellowship in Aurora just before the start of the millennium. ....
Aside from MDHI s programming, a nonprofit named Community Solutions, whose mission is to create a lasting end to homelessness that leaves no one behind, will present its Built for Zero movement, which involves over eighty cities and counties using a data-driven approach to end homelessness. Through a 2020 Point in Time Count spearheaded by MDHI, surveyors identified 6,104 homeless individuals either staying in shelters or living in unsheltered settings in Denver, Jefferson, Douglas, Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield and Boulder counties. The numbers for both Denver 4,171 in 2020 and the metro area have been rising since 2017, even before the pandemic hit; service providers believe the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased since then. While MDHI didn t conduct a count of the unsheltered population in 2021 because of COVID-19 concerns, it will be tallying those in shelters. ....
With an emergency winter shelter set to wrap up operations in April, the City of Aurora is looking at establishing new safe-camping and -parking sites for people experiencing homelessness fast. It’s about creating options, and that’s what we’re focused on, says Jessica Prosser, Aurora s director of Housing and Community Services. Building a brand-new shelter has a long lead time and is very expensive, and these safe outdoor spaces create an option that’s a little more nimble in the future to keep people safe and healthy. As the COVID pandemic lingers and some homeless people either can t or choose not to use shelters, safe- camping and -parking sites are becoming more common throughout Colorado. Denver has had two safe-camping sites since December and a third is on the way. Aurora already has one, too: In January, the city set up a safe-camping site right next to the 100-bed emergency shelter that was established last fall in an industrial area in the northwe ....