Safeside Recovery Center is launching ‘Pueblo 1000’, a community campaign to fund the city-owned homeless shelter in Pueblo.
The campaign's goal is to secure 1,000 donors to make a recurring monthly donation to help fund the program, according to interim shelter manager and president of Safeside Recovery, Rob Miller.
“We are working as hard as we can to make this a shelter that the staff and the guests and the city can be proud of. But stuff like that doesn't just happen. We need support from the community.”
The city took ownership of the shelter in October after two executive leaders left and allegations came forward that a former employee stole from people staying at the shelter. Safeside Recovery is the interim director of the shelter while a more permanent solution is in progress.
Typically, fundraising is the responsibility of the executive director, but with so much turnover, the shelter is working on a limited budget.
“We know if we are the group selected to operate the shelter or somebody else is, they're going to be starting out sort of behind the eight ball (as) there hasn't been an active executive director for almost a year now,” said Miller. “We wanted to do this campaign so that whoever takes over the shelter has some funds to start growing with the city”
The shelter is still working under the same budget as the last entity running the program.
“And that's what we've been operating on for several months now,” said Miller. “The city's not going to give us more money, so we need to go out to the public. And that's what the Pueblo 1000 is about. It's helping make the shelter better so we can serve the residents of the community in a better way.”
The city is currently in the process of reviewing requests for proposals from organizations interested in managing the program, including Safeside Recovery.
Regardless of who gets chosen to run the program, funds from the ‘Pueblo 1000’ campaign will go toward supporting the homeless shelter.
“We wanted to do this campaign so that whoever takes over the shelter has some funds to start growing,” said Miller. “The city, as part of the RFP, is agreeing to pay some funds to operate the mission, but we know it takes quite a bit more than that.”
