Our sisters’ daily struggle to find a safe place to sleep
Rat-a-tat-tat! It’s 3 am Monday (or Thursday) morning, sisters. No rest
for the weary...up n’ at ‘em! It’s time to play the newest reality show:
Who Gets to Sleep Inside Tonight?/ You’re gonna love it!
Before (April), if you were a woman (or transgendered individual) who
needed a warm, safe place to sleep at night, you could pretty much count
on getting into the Women’s Emergency Shelter (WES) at 13th and Elati.
the floor, you share a single toilet with 59 shelter mates, and you have
to be out by (7?)--it sure beats dealing with the elements and the
dangers that lurk outside--including the so-called “protection” offered
by some men. If you had nowhere else to go--maybe you’d lost your job
and your apartment, or your spouse died leaving you out in the cold, or
you’d finally left an abusive relationship--and maybe you’d tried to get
into the CHUM church shelter program and the Delores Project overflow
but you didn’t win their lotteries--well, you could line up outside the
WES building, and starting at 6pm you’d probably get to enter and spend
the night. (And once the shelter was full, women who still needed a
place to stay would be sent to another shelter or given a motel voucher.)
But then the rules got more complicated. Now, there’s no lining up
outside the building each night. (Apparently the neighbors in the Golden
Triangle didn’t like the way that looked.) Instead, you now get to play
“the game” for a WES mat every Monday and Thursday morning, and if you
win you get to keep your mat until the next game day. And here’s the
really fun part: there are several paths you can take, and you have no
way of knowing which path, if any, will work for you. Will you win or
lose? Ready, get set...grab your worldly belongings, and let the game begin!
Should you follow the St Francis path? Their doors open at 6am, but if
you want to maximize your chances of getting one of the 10 “first come
first served” WES mats they control, you’d better be in line by 4 or
4:30 am. That’s the strategy two women I spoke to employed on a Monday
morning recently. No matter that it was bitterly cold, both were sick,
and one walked with a cane. Getting in line in the middle of the night
was better than spending the whole next night outside, which could
happen if they didn’t secure a mat. Fortunately, one of them has a car
(so far) which made the trip over from the shelter at 13th and Elati a
bit easier. (Others aren’t so lucky, and have to walk the (two miles?)
at that hour.) At around 8:30 they found out they’d made the list.
They’re home free...for three nights...
(I’ve actually oversimplified things. In fact, while at St Francis, you
can also elect to enter the daily lottery for one of 20 cots available
through the Women’s Homeless Initiative/CHUM program, which shelters
women at a different church each night. Hmmm, a cot, not a mat, and less
crowded, and dinner and breakfast besides, and nice bathrooms, but it’s
only for one night, and what if you don’t win again tomorrow...And if
you get a CHUM cot on Sunday or Wednesday night, you’ll be dropped off
at St Francis too late the next morning to get in line for a WES mat...
What to do??)
Or should you make your way over to the Denver Human Services building
at 12th and Federal, where the General Assistance department there
controls access to some of the mats? (I’m not sure how many.) A woman I
spoke with used that strategy this Monday. She took a bus there,
arriving at 5:30 am, and waited outside in line until the doors opened
at 7. Then she put her name on a list (she was third) and was seen at
around 9am. Her diligence paid off--she got a mat! (If she’d come later,
she may have lost out to women who’d come for Food Stamps or AND
appointments and such.) Then she headed downstairs and got in another
line to ask for a bus ticket to get back downtown, where she could get a
free meal somewhere, use a computer at the library, and (at 6pm) walk
over to her mat at 13th and Elati.
If, on the other hand, you like to gamble, and don’t want to get up
quite so early and risk pneumonia waiting outside, you might choose the
Gathering Place path. They control 15 WES mats via a lottery, which you
can sign up for when they open at the civilized hour of 8:30 am. And on
Monday, you can also play the lottery there (but not at St Francis) for
an overflow bed (cot?) at the Delores Project FOR A WHOLE WEEK. But at
TGP you can’t play the CHUM lottery...Help! This is really getting
crazy! You need a computer program to figure out your odds!
Now what if, despite your best effort to choose the right path, all has
failed...it’s 6 pm and you’ve nowhere to sleep! Easy peasy, just head
over to the Samaritan House (right near St Francis). The staff there
will try to get you in somewhere...maybe at WES, if there are still
vacancies, because some women didn’t show up...or maybe a motel
voucher--if you aren’t on the “Do not re-voucher” list for one reason or
another...in which case it’s the great outdoors for you.
Unfortunately, when one woman went to the Samaritan House at 6 pm
recently, after not making it into CHUM or WES, the staff person wasn’t
there, so she walked all the way to WES, but they sent her to the
Sheriff’s Department, where at 9pm her name was taken, and at 10pm she
was given a motel voucher and a bus ticket. She arrived around 11:30,
was in bed at midnight, but had to wake up early to start playing the
game again.
Rat-a-tat-tat! It’s 3 am Monday (or Thursday) morning, sisters. No rest
for the weary...up n’ at ‘em! It’s time to play the newest reality show:
Who Gets to Sleep Inside Tonight?/ You’re gonna love it!
Before (April), if you were a woman (or transgendered individual) who
needed a warm, safe place to sleep at night, you could pretty much count
on getting into the Women’s Emergency Shelter (WES) at 13th and Elati.
the floor, you share a single toilet with 59 shelter mates, and you have
to be out by (7?)--it sure beats dealing with the elements and the
dangers that lurk outside--including the so-called “protection” offered
by some men. If you had nowhere else to go--maybe you’d lost your job
and your apartment, or your spouse died leaving you out in the cold, or
you’d finally left an abusive relationship--and maybe you’d tried to get
into the CHUM church shelter program and the Delores Project overflow
but you didn’t win their lotteries--well, you could line up outside the
WES building, and starting at 6pm you’d probably get to enter and spend
the night. (And once the shelter was full, women who still needed a
place to stay would be sent to another shelter or given a motel voucher.)
But then the rules got more complicated. Now, there’s no lining up
outside the building each night. (Apparently the neighbors in the Golden
Triangle didn’t like the way that looked.) Instead, you now get to play
“the game” for a WES mat every Monday and Thursday morning, and if you
win you get to keep your mat until the next game day. And here’s the
really fun part: there are several paths you can take, and you have no
way of knowing which path, if any, will work for you. Will you win or
lose? Ready, get set...grab your worldly belongings, and let the game begin!
Should you follow the St Francis path? Their doors open at 6am, but if
you want to maximize your chances of getting one of the 10 “first come
first served” WES mats they control, you’d better be in line by 4 or
4:30 am. That’s the strategy two women I spoke to employed on a Monday
morning recently. No matter that it was bitterly cold, both were sick,
and one walked with a cane. Getting in line in the middle of the night
was better than spending the whole next night outside, which could
happen if they didn’t secure a mat. Fortunately, one of them has a car
(so far) which made the trip over from the shelter at 13th and Elati a
bit easier. (Others aren’t so lucky, and have to walk the (two miles?)
at that hour.) At around 8:30 they found out they’d made the list.
They’re home free...for three nights...
(I’ve actually oversimplified things. In fact, while at St Francis, you
can also elect to enter the daily lottery for one of 20 cots available
through the Women’s Homeless Initiative/CHUM program, which shelters
women at a different church each night. Hmmm, a cot, not a mat, and less
crowded, and dinner and breakfast besides, and nice bathrooms, but it’s
only for one night, and what if you don’t win again tomorrow...And if
you get a CHUM cot on Sunday or Wednesday night, you’ll be dropped off
at St Francis too late the next morning to get in line for a WES mat...
What to do??)
Or should you make your way over to the Denver Human Services building
at 12th and Federal, where the General Assistance department there
controls access to some of the mats? (I’m not sure how many.) A woman I
spoke with used that strategy this Monday. She took a bus there,
arriving at 5:30 am, and waited outside in line until the doors opened
at 7. Then she put her name on a list (she was third) and was seen at
around 9am. Her diligence paid off--she got a mat! (If she’d come later,
she may have lost out to women who’d come for Food Stamps or AND
appointments and such.) Then she headed downstairs and got in another
line to ask for a bus ticket to get back downtown, where she could get a
free meal somewhere, use a computer at the library, and (at 6pm) walk
over to her mat at 13th and Elati.
If, on the other hand, you like to gamble, and don’t want to get up
quite so early and risk pneumonia waiting outside, you might choose the
Gathering Place path. They control 15 WES mats via a lottery, which you
can sign up for when they open at the civilized hour of 8:30 am. And on
Monday, you can also play the lottery there (but not at St Francis) for
an overflow bed (cot?) at the Delores Project FOR A WHOLE WEEK. But at
TGP you can’t play the CHUM lottery...Help! This is really getting
crazy! You need a computer program to figure out your odds!
Now what if, despite your best effort to choose the right path, all has
failed...it’s 6 pm and you’ve nowhere to sleep! Easy peasy, just head
over to the Samaritan House (right near St Francis). The staff there
will try to get you in somewhere...maybe at WES, if there are still
vacancies, because some women didn’t show up...or maybe a motel
voucher--if you aren’t on the “Do not re-voucher” list for one reason or
another...in which case it’s the great outdoors for you.
Unfortunately, when one woman went to the Samaritan House at 6 pm
recently, after not making it into CHUM or WES, the staff person wasn’t
there, so she walked all the way to WES, but they sent her to the
Sheriff’s Department, where at 9pm her name was taken, and at 10pm she
was given a motel voucher and a bus ticket. She arrived around 11:30,
was in bed at midnight, but had to wake up early to start playing the
game again.
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