The Veterans Community Project of Longmont on Wednesday launched a brand new mobile outreach unit. The van will connect veterans experiencing homelessness in rural parts of northern Colorado with resources like transportation and temporary housing.
KUNC's Beau Baker spoke with VCP's executive director, Jennifer Seybold, about the mobile unit and efforts to aid unhoused veterans in our region.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Beau Baker: Jennifer, The Veterans Community Project started in Kansas City as a village of almost 50 tiny homes for veterans experiencing homelessness. Can you tell me how the organization made its way to Longmont?
Jennifer Seybold: We really have been operating here since 2020. There was a group of individuals here in Longmont tasked with looking at veteran homelessness in our community. What are the ways that we might go about solving that?
Kevin Mulshine — he's a developer and owns HMS Development — was tasked with sort of looking at other community models. So he visited Kansas City and said, 'I want to bring this to Longmont.'
The really cool thing is Kevin put his money where his mouth is. He donated the land for our project and worked with the city really closely. So he gave us a little more than two acres to build our tiny homes on here in Longmont. Our village is not complete yet, and construction is underway.
But we've been serving veterans in the community since that time through our outreach center on Main Street. And we've been able to help more than 300 veterans in our community already and permanently House 40 even though we don't have a village yet. So the work of our case managers is already having a pretty significant impact in our community.
Beau: So the tiny homes in Longmont are currently underway. But this week you launched this mobile outreach program that includes a fully ADA-accessible van. What will this provide to unhoused veterans?
Jennifer: Yeah, this is a really exciting project. A lot of services are just really centralized in large city spaces. And so when you're in that area, there's a lot more access. But many of our veterans don't live in those communities. They live in much more rural spaces. They often don't have transportation to get to even doctors appointments or other things like that. And so it's just tremendously important to come to where the need is because a lot of people cannot come to where we are.
Beau: The van will be starting out in both mountain and plains communities like Gilpin, Boulder, Clear Creek and Weld Counties. What will the mobile unit offer?
Jennifer: We see veterans from all over northern Colorado and because we're so spread out, sometimes it can be hard for folks to get to where we are. So this allows us to go to them. We can get somebody onboarded for support right in the moment.
We can get them signed up to have some contact with a case manager. Or one of the things our case managers do best is just connect people to services that are close to them. So making sure we're doing a really soft handoff of that. Getting an idea of what that person needs. We're also carrying around supplies like food and winter supplies. Basic things that will change seasonally depending on the needs. But it gives us a chance to reach people who, one, may not know that we exist and, two, just may be too far to come into the outreach center.
Beau: It sounds like it really does a little bit of everything. So this mobile unit is paid for by a two-year grant that came out of last year's state legislative session. It took some work to get rolling, including setting up a partnership between the Veterans Community Project and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. In your experience, how difficult is it to get funding for services for veterans in need?
Jennifer: This is an interesting question, and I probably should say that we're also a little bit unique in the way that we define 'veteran.' We do not look at someone's length of service or type of duty, and we do not care about their discharge status. That's a little bit different than some other organizations. It's certainly different than the eligibility requirements for VA services. So that makes our fundraising a little bit of an added challenge just because we don't necessarily take federal funding if there are any strings attached to it.
We are getting more state support, and I'm really excited to see that states are kind of minimizing the restrictions. But we want to make sure all the funding we're taking doesn't prevent us from serving any veteran who walks in the door regardless of their discharge status. I think a lot of people don't necessarily know that many of our veterans are not getting supportive services from VA and other government agencies.
I think there's a little bit of a misconception of who is eligible for those services. There's an estimate that more than 500,000 veterans are living with an other than honorable discharge status, which means they would not be eligible for those kinds of services, which makes programs like ours essential. And we really rely on public support for that.
Beau: That was Jennifer Seybold, the executive director of Veterans Community Project of Longmont.
To learn more about the Vererans Community Project and its mobile unit – visit https://www.veteranscommunityproject.org/vcp-colorado
This story was produced by KUNC's Maxine Speier