Dizzy Wind of Boulder describes the founding of Boulder’s first publication that focuses on issues facing those experiencing homelessness.
Boulder will be the latest home to a new publication now in the founding stages that will address issues related to those who are or have been without housing. Three Boulderites have been planning the newspaper which one of the co-founders describes as “more similar to a pamphlet” because of a lack of funds to publish in a full newspaper format. The publication should debut later this winter. One of the three co-founders, Jefferson Le Suer who is also known as Boulder musician Dizzy Wind, said that the official name of the publication will be decided Monday, but will definitely include the word “street.”
In Denver, Get Loud Magazine a publication with a similar platform, was founded in 2012 to give those who are experiencing homelessness a wider opportunity to be heard. The Boulder publication will be the first of its kind locally.
Le Suer said that the planning stages have not been stressful and to the contrary, “It’s so much fun. It’s kind of like music for me.”
The conceptualization for starting a newspaper drew from the co-founders’ experiences in a community that is under- or uninformed, “We don’t think people speak the truth about homelessness.”
During the planning stages, the three co-founders discovered that each will contribute a different perspective, “One of the people in this ad-hoc committee wants something uplifting, another wants things for people to think about, and I want the nitty gritty about some of the situations I’ve heard about since I’ve been in Boulder.” Le Suer gave a specific example, “I used to work at the Bridge House years ago and we gave showers five days a week and now there’s no place since the Bridge House lost their facility.”
Boulder’s only day shelter, the Bridge House, closed in November after the organization was forced to end a ten-year lease and has since not found a permanent location. Local churches have stepped in to try to fill the gap but Le Suer says that the challenges continue, “There’s no place to take a shower except for at [The Boulder Shelter for the Homeless]. The Shelter is run by a lottery meaning you get in, or you don’t. If you’re at a warming center, say out on Baseline [Road] and you have to get a shower at the Shelter you have from six to eight in the morning to do that. Most people don’t have money for a bus to begin with, and even if they did have money for a bus, getting up at 6 o’clock and getting to north Boulder to take a shower is next to impossible.”
Le Suer suggested that a new system of having access to the showers at the Boulder shelter for three days a week until ten in the morning would help alleviate the difficulty in getting to the shelter under current regulations, “These are very simple things that can be changed and that’s what we’re hoping with this newspaper, that we can expose problems that people never think about that actually affect the homeless on a day-to-day basis.”
“We want to have something that’s very truthful and very uplifting.”
