Denver’s newly homeless can soon receive guidance and resources from others who used to live on the streets

When Myra Nagy was living on the streets of Denver from 2010 to 2012, she would have benefitted from an in-person center to help her find food assistance, available shelter beds and a way to quickly get a new identification card and birth certificate.

Instead, she relied on others who were homeless to direct her to shelters with available beds. And when she showed up to human service organizations that provided food, lines were often long and sometimes items had run out by the time Nagy made it to the front.

“Places would send me back and forth across town for services, often on foot, which was a waste of time,” she said. “When you’re unhoused, you need to time your day around getting food, where you’re going to sleep, how you’re going to change your clothes and keep yourself clean. Then, you can try to take care of getting other resources.”

Now, more than a decade after Nagy broke free from homelessness, she’s helping to develop a pilot program that aims to fill in the gaps she experienced while living outside.

The proposed neighborhood resource hub — spearheaded by the nonprofit Elevated Denver — aims to be a one-stop shop service that links people who are newly homeless, or on the cusp of it in Denver, to critical services such as housing, healthcare, job training, utility assistance and help with credit card debt, at a time when they need it most.

The plan calls for the hub to open in early 2025, with a staff of two certified peer support specialists, or people who have been homeless, for about 20 hours per week. The search is on for a facility to host the program that is not in downtown Denver. The hub will likely operate from a library, community center or recreation center.

The hub will provide personalized assistance to people who are facing an eviction, or suspect they’ll soon lose their housing, and people who have been homeless for no more than 90 days.

The goal of the program is to hopefully shorten the amount of time a person is homeless or even prevent it, said Liane Morrison, chief of strategy and impact at Elevated Denver, which works with people who have been homeless to co-create strategies and solutions that can prevent and address the issue.

The hub idea was developed in three months by 10 people who have been homeless, local business leaders, government employees, nonprofits and human service organizations while Elevated Denver facilitated discussions among the group.

“This is not just to be done theoretically. This will be implemented,” Morrison said of the resource hub. 

“We’ve been talking to four agencies in the Denver metro area to figure out if they’re interested in a partnership to pilot this and we have a couple that can while others want to know more before they commit,” she said. “Some of those organizations have been with us all summer and have watched this process unfold. And there’s no lack of interest from folks who have experienced homelessness to be part of this (as peers) with sufficient guidance and training.”

The push to launch a new resource hub comes as homelessness in the seven-county metro Denver area increased by 10% this year, to 9,977 people in 2024 from 9,065 people in 2023 — and while the number of families who were new to homelessness significantly rose across the region this year, according to the most-recent point-in-time survey, which captures the number of people who are homeless on a single night annually.

This year, 3,535 people were newly homeless in metro Denver, down from 3,996 people in 2023 and up from 2,634 people in 2022.

This year, 2,435 families in the region were new to homelessness, up from 1,316 families in 2023 and up from 597 families in 2022, according to the survey.

“And that’s probably why we’re seeing more interest in the use and deployment of peers,” said Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. 

“We are very supportive of the peer support-peer specialist model because working with people who have experienced homelessness or a mental health or substance use disorder — or anything that’s deeply personal that can be really hard to talk about — is about building a trusting relationship,” she said. “And who better to build that relationship than somebody who has experienced that themselves?”

Elevating personal experiences

Peer support professionals use their experiences to help others overcome familiar life challenges by helping people build the skills needed to maintain their health and well-being.

Peer coaches can work in many settings, offering services at emergency departments, jails and prisons, housing organizations and addiction recovery centers. 

More than 30,000 peer supporters are working in the U.S. and their numbers are rapidly growing. That’s partly thanks to funding from state and federal sources, including Medicare and Medicaid, which help cover the cost of peer support services to address the effects of the opioid crisis and to help cover gaps created by a shortage of mental health care workers.

Their empathetic and personalized approach focuses on empowering people, and the peer model can help change how human service workers engage people who struggle with mental illness, addiction, unstable housing and incarceration.

“For somebody who is facing homelessness for the very first time, the fear can be overwhelming, so much so, that we hear about households that just don’t even ask for help because they’re so afraid of what that’s going to say about them,” Alderman said. “Peers can keep them motivated enough to keep trying when the system tells them they shouldn’t.”

Expanding and strengthening the peer support workforce statewide was a top priority in the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration’s 2022 workforce strategic plan.

Lawmakers appropriated $5.9 million in federal stimulus funds to expand and strengthen the number of peer support professionals statewide when Senate Bill 181 passed that year.

The funds were meant to help organizations that provide adult mental health and substance use disorder treatment train and certify 300 Coloradans who have faced behavioral health challenges and become certified peer specialists.

The training program, which is expected to end in December, requires the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration to track the number of peer support specialists statewide.

Starting in 2022, Elevated Denver created 30 podcast episodes to understand major gaps in the homelessness services system, expand awareness about housing issues and humanize people who are homeless, Morrison said.

Later that year, the organization started doing 40 long-form interviews with people who were homeless that overwhelmingly showed people can’t access the services they need when they need them.

The hub aims to help change that, Morrison said.

“When we asked people where they got their information to get assistance, the most trusted sources were not case managers or social workers — they were peers,” she said.

Elevated Denver and the other leaders working to open the hub face a set of challenges before it opens. 

The group must spread awareness about the hub and find ways to build trust with people who are homeless, not easy at a time when there’s lots of turnover among homeless services providers.

Neighbors may complain about the hub’s proximity to them and peer specialists will need to keep the resources they share with program participants up to date.

Hub leaders will also manage requests from people who aren’t a part of their target population and lead them to other relevant resources and figure out how best to serve a population that has complex needs.

The hub will likely open in a neighborhood that has high eviction rates, steep rent prices and a large number of people needing food assistance.

The pilot program will run for six months to help leaders gauge its effectiveness.

“Then we would like to then hand it off to a partner in that community that can run it permanently,” Morrison said. “We’d love to see these hubs in a lot of different neighborhoods.”

Betsy Craft, a certified peer and family specialist, has helped people who were homeless, incarcerated and struggling with addiction.

The resources she connects people to are based on their needs and wants, she said.

In two years, while working for the Denver Municipal Public Defender’s Office, she helped four people find housing, a process that took about nine months for each person.

She’s also connected people to syringe-access programs, mutual-aid organizations, university admissions officers and therapists, often waiting outside for her clients until they finish receiving services.

“Our lived experience is our superpower because we can build connection and trust with people, in a second,” said Craft, who before she helped Elevated Denver create the resource hub model was homeless and incarcerated and survived an overdose and violence.

“It’s not to say the social worker or case manager or clinical lens isn’t needed — those are also very important members on the team,” she said. “A lot of people in the peer support space are saying, any time you have a case manager, you need a peer support professional.”

During her last eight months of homelessness, Nagy was determined to finally emancipate from homelessness.

“I started collecting resources myself because I saw the failure of people on the streets from them not knowing where resources were,” Nagy said. “So I did my own collection and I became the resources person, while I was on the streets and I stayed at the library, kept everything up-to-date, and when I got housed I did the same thing — I kept people linked to resources.”

Elevated Denver is fundraising to help launch the neighborhood resource hub and is looking for individual and corporate sponsorships to help fund the initiative. 

Elevated Denver has raised $85,000, Morrison said. It would cost $155,000 to run the hub for a year.

“Most people in this world would not last a day unhoused, if they knew what it took — the kind of looks you get, how you’re treated and how you can’t even use the bathroom anywhere or even get a drink of water,” Craft said. 

“It makes you feel like crap about yourself and you internalize that stigma and think you’re not worth these resources, and what we can do as peers is show people these resources are for them,” she said. “It’s really important to meet people where they’re at, and show up, no matter what. “We’re like their lifeline.”