When officials reached out to tell human services providers to expect less cash from Boulder County’s community partnership grants next year, the Early Childhood Council started making plans. But when the county announced actual numbers earlier this month, the organization was surprised to see it wouldn’t receive any money in 2025.
“We have had a funding relationship with the county for over 25 years,” said Kaycee Headrick, CEO of the Boulder County nonprofit, which helps families navigate the childcare system, supports providers and advocates for the sector. “The total elimination is really devastating for our organization.”
Ten other former grantees also received $0 from the Boulder County grant program. That includes grantees like the City of Boulder and St. Vrain Valley School District that were no longer eligible as the county only considered nonprofits for the grant this year.
Dozens of organizations saw grant reductions between 10% and 100%, though seven organizations that didn’t get a grant in 2024 are set to receive one in 2025. Affected groups provide vital services such as homeless shelters, food pantries, and child and health care centers.
The cuts come as human services are stretched thin, and other sources of state and federal funding, such as COVID-era federal recovery dollars, are drying up. Boulder County’s grant program will distribute just under $8 million in 2025, compared to $12.3 million in 2024.
The county received $16 million in requests for the competitive, non-guaranteed grant program this year, according to officials.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to make anybody feel good about this. I don’t feel good about it,” Commissioner Claire Levy said at an Oct. 15 town hall. “It’s something we felt we needed to do to be responsive to the increase in need and a change in the funding structure that the state is implementing.”
‘This hurts’
The county has blamed under-funded, state-run programs and services that Boulder County is required to deliver, such as CCAP, SNAP and TANF, as part of the reason for the cuts. For example, there’s currently a $7 million funding gap for CCAP, which provides financial assistance for childcare. Enrollment for the program has been frozen since earlier this year in multiple counties, including Boulder. Plus, new federal rules will increase CCAP costs by an estimated $1.5 million in the county, according to a county spokesperson.
“Demand continues to increase for human services while available federal and state funding continues to decrease from very high federal funding at the peak of the global pandemic,” county spokesperson Gloria Handyside wrote in an email. “Costs have gone up while county revenue remains relatively flat.”
The community partnership grants — funded by the Human Services Safety Net tax, the Health and Human Services Fund and the general operations fund — are just one source of county funding for human services, and some organizations receive county money from multiple buckets. Even so, nonprofits have said the cuts to this specific program will impact the services they provide and the number of people they can provide them to.
“Organizationally this hurts, and we are more saddened by what this is doing to our overall community, because there’s a lot of calculations that have to be made to reduce services to some of our most vulnerable,” said Headrick. “I think we’ve come a long way. It just feels like taking steps back.”
Boulder council member Mark Wallach asked in a Sept. 28 public email about the possibility of diverting funds from joint projects with the county to bridge the gap, saying he believed “the County has failed to be a good partner with the City in providing these core services, and that we need to look to our own interests in funding these organizations.”
But for now, the city isn’t moving money around.
“[T]hey feel their cuts were the best they can do and were appropriate,” Wallach wrote in an email to Boulder Weekly. “I disagree, and believe we could have worked together to soften the blow.”
Cutting programs and people
For nonprofits already operating on shoestring budgets, difficult decisions lie ahead.
Cuts to health and wellbeing programs, which include mental and behavioral health services, made up the lion’s share of the $4.4 million in cuts, with a reduction of more than $3 million. (It’s still the area with the most total funding from the grant program, and the 2025 recommended base budget for health and welfare is set to see an $8 million increase overall.)
Money for housing and homelessness prevention saw the lowest overall reduction both by dollar amount and share. Funding for that service bucket was reduced by $323,859, about 14% of its $2,323,364 total in 2024.
Still, providers say they will feel the burn. All Roads, formerly Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, will get more than $280,000 less from the county, a 30% reduction of that grant and the largest cut in the organization’s 42-year history.
The nonprofit will still receive an additional $900,000 annually in non-competitive funding from the county, but All Roads spokesperson Andy Schultheiss said the shelter will likely have to reduce the number of people it can serve in a given night.
“The worst part of this job is turning people away when it’s 20 degrees outside and there’s nothing we can do,” he said. Even after increasing capacity from 160 to 180 earlier this year, the shelter still runs out of space.
“[The county’s] got a challenge for sure…So I’m not blaming anybody,” Schultheiss said. “It’s just a really unfortunate situation, just as we’re starting to make some progress on getting people off the streets.”
With cuts to organizations that work closely with the shelter, such as Mental Health Partners and Emergency Family Assistance Association (EFAA), Schultheiss said “the whole infrastructure for homelessness is taking a hit.”
EFAA Executive Director Julie Van Domelen called the overall cuts “drastic” in an Oct. 22 public hearing and said the cuts to EFAA’s grant mean 100 families will not receive rental assistance to avoid evictions.
TLC Learning Center in Longmont lost the county’s grant completely. Last year, it received more than $40,000, which went toward a scholarship fund for the nonprofit’s child care and therapy programs. Typically, the organization gives out $135,000 to families who cannot pay for those services, according to Executive Director Matt Eldred.
“We’re going to have to make a hard decision; we may reallocate those slots to full-paying families, which is not a part of our mission,” Eldred said. “We have families that are paying $1,600 a month for child care and families that are paying zero, and they’re all important in our funding model. But if we have to take more of those family slots that are paying zero and give them to the $1,600-a-month family, those [non-paying] families are out there, and they want and need these services.”
For many organizations, staffing costs make up a large portion of expenses. At TLC, for example, salaries and benefits account for 82% of the organization’s costs, according to Eldred.
“As much as I’d like to say, ‘We’re gonna turn off the lights and flush the toilets less and recycle and all the things we want to do to save money,’ none of that is going to make an impact as much as salaries and benefits, because it’s the largest expense,” he said. “When you have to make those decisions, you’re going to have to start cutting salaries and benefits, which means either cutting programs, cutting people, or cutting altogether the types of services you provide.”
‘The pot is not growing’
The county budget won’t be finalized until December, and some in the human services ecosystem are still pleading with commissioners to reconsider, warning that other costs (like those in the criminal justice system) could go up as a result.
It seems unlikely that the community partnership grants would change, but it’s possible other funding sources could fill the gap. For example, the county’s Survive and Thrive program is set to announce $7.8 million for nonprofits and childcare providers in the coming months, according to a county spokesperson.
At the Oct. 16 town hall, service providers and county officials alike also discussed the possibility of new taxes or special districts to establish more funding for childcare and other human services.
“The pot is still the pot; it’s not growing,” said TLC’s Eldred. “We have got to think strategically about how we increase the revenue sources that come into this community to fund our human service agencies.”
A budget work session presentation is scheduled for Nov. 14, and commissioners are scheduled to adopt the 2025 budget Dec. 3. View the recommended budget and provide feedback at boco.org/budget.