Boulder Feet Forward is known for our Tuesdays in the Park event. Ours isn’t the only meal being served to Boulder’s unhoused community throughout the week, but it’s one of the larger events of its kind.
We bring 13 tables and load them with pet care supplies, clothing and gear, socks and gloves and hats and hand-warmers, hygiene supplies chosen and informed by lived experience (wipes are more useful than soap); water bottles; hot coffee and other beverages; snacks to go, including fruits and vegetables; and a bagged lunch. All this is in addition to our full, hot meal, prepared by a trained chef, which always includes a complete serving of protein and a heaping scoop of dignity.
We’ve brought care and intentionality to making this event what it is: not just a way to get some much-needed calories into unhoused folks, but truly a gathering — a place to bring community together.
When I first took over the events for Feet Forward, I began to learn the landscape of providers that worked in the same community. There was the Works Wagon, a harm-reduction outreach program from Boulder County Public Health, taking the opportunity to reach the large numbers of people that the meal draws. Through a fundamental misunderstanding of what harm reduction actually entails, the Works Wagon had been alienated, moved further and further to the fringes of our event before I took it over, barely tolerated and unappreciated for providing safe-use supplies like needles, test strips and crucial, overdose-reversing naloxone. They also supply snacks and other gear. During the summer, theirs is the wagon to visit for outdoor essentials like bug spray and sunscreen.
The Works Wagon provides a vital service with kindness and dignity, and I was quick to welcome them back with open arms to participate freely in our event and programming. With a renewed partnership, they have also provided us with naloxone training and sexual health supplies such as condoms.
This fantastic team is just one example of why all who want to provide a service to those in need should be welcome to do so, and why relationships between providers are crucial if we actually care about helping the most vulnerable members of our community.
Our event now hosts a variety of service providers, from Community Court to Annie and Millie’s Place for pet care, as well as outreach at intervals from Recovery Cafe, Mental Health Partners, Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, All Roads, TGTHR youth shelter and others.
Partnerships and communication can only strengthen the missions of all of us working in the same community.
When I took over as program director for Boulder Feet Forward, I was tasked with designing a Peer Support program, per the terms of a grant we’d received through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). I already knew it would be a street outreach program — we would not work from an office but would go into the community and literally meet people where they are: on park benches, in hospital beds, in courtrooms, under bridges, or in the grassy shade of a tree.
Peer support is not giving out a pair of shoes, nor is it serving a meal. The peer support program would have to go further in using lived experience, motivational interviewing and trauma-informed practice to help our participants meet their goals for wellness — whatever they may be.
Along the way to meeting personal goals — whether for housing, substance use recovery, physical or mental health, employment, schooling or social needs — there will inevitably arise tasks and projects. This is where the most vulnerable among us encounter formidable barriers; not just unhoused folks, but people with intersecting identities.
There are resources to be had: organizations that provide free or sliding scale mental health support and counseling, legal services, shelter, assistance with substance use recovery, medical care and housing. Boulder has one of the densest concentrations of nonprofits in the country.
But those of us who work among populations who have been marginalized and invisible for years, sometimes decades, find that the amount of savvy, effort and persistence it takes to navigate these services is a steep barrier, one that eventually becomes insurmountable as burnout, disillusionment and sheer trauma increase over time.
There are resource navigators, organizations who exist to help people avail themselves of available programs and services.
And yet, so starkly missing is anything resembling a roadmap to these services that my team often finds ourselves acting as resource navigator navigators. When we help folks plot their trajectories, often the list of appointments, different organizations they’ll need to involve and the sheer difficulties of taking the first step looks daunting.
Trying to get help is a full-time job. The longer the wait, the more piecemeal the help on offer, the more potential there is for people to give up.
We exist to help people through those various processes, even when we have to hike into the canyon to deliver bad news, hold a hand under a bridge or walk into an encampment to make an appointment. That’s what we do, and we do it because it’s necessary.
Recently, Boulder Feet Forward announced its partnership with Haven Ridge. No more will we operate as our own 501(c)(3) organization; rather, we’ll function as the outreach branch for an outfit that already operates two excellent programs. The Lodge offers shelter and navigation services for women and transgender people, and Mother House is a residential program for pregnant women and those with young children.
By joining with an organization already providing services that overlap our own in many areas, we can strengthen our mission. Maybe more importantly, we can increase how holistic our assistance is to those most in need.
As the issues and crises we face locally and globally mount, it can seem like we’re short on solutions. But there are solutions out there, creative minds at work on our worst issues and selfless workers doing all they can to solve every last piece of every puzzling problem.
Good old Mr. Rogers famously said “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
I’m honored that a part of my job is to do just that. While we will continue unflinchingly in that role, perhaps it’s time for the community of helpers to raise our flags higher, to better pave the pathways to our doors and to create partnerships and roadmaps between us.
Perhaps doing so will empower those who want to become helpers, but haven’t known where to place their efforts. Would you have done anything differently if you’d known what to do with all the apples your tree dropped this fall? Or where to take the boots that fit your kids last winter?
And perhaps the creation of a robust, well-communicating network of providers will shed enough light that even the most jaded of our marginalized, vulnerable populations could better see their way.
Libby Ogletree is now the program manager of Boulder Feet Forward at Haven Ridge and the executive chef who prepares the Tuesday meal. She is a Boulder native and aspiring artist.