10 FEBRUARY 16-22, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | to get unrestricted support to those at Club Q that night as quickly as possible. In addition to making sure the community was consulted, Williams recognized other chal- lenges specifi c to the Colorado Springs event. Some of the victims might fear being outed, or might not go by their legal names, or might need support from people who are not their legal partners or members of their biological fami- lies. And historically, the police haven’t always treated LGBTQ+ people or people of color well, Williams says; this response would require a sensitivity that Williams worried was lacking at both the Colorado Healing Fund and the Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance. And in fact, after the community pushed back, the Colorado Healing Fund announced on January 17 that a new partner, Community Health Partnership, would be the liaison for any Club Q victims who were uncomfortable interacting with law enforcement. While COVA would continue to disburse the pay- ments, a Club Q Advisory Committee would advise CHF in its response to the tragedy. But according to Williams, that move by CHF didn’t fi x the problems. Colorado has seen far too many tragedies since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School. And after each one, there have been controversies over how support — both emotional and fi nancial — was provided to victims and others affected. After the Aurora theater shooting in July 2012, then-Governor John Hickenlooper brought in the Community First Foundation, which connects donors and nonprofi ts, to start collecting money for the victims. It cre- ated the Aurora Victim Fund, which gave the fi rst $100,000 it raised to local nonprofi ts and government agencies, including Aurora Mental Health and the Aurora Chamber of Commerce. That’s not what people thought they were donating to, charge Tom and Caren Teves, whose son Alex was murdered protecting his girlfriend. In August 2012, Teves and the families of others who were killed went public with their accusations that Community First handled the Aurora Victim Fund irresponsibly. Since then, some of those families have continued to warn others whose loved ones die in mass shootings, as well as the public, that their donations may not be going to the intended place. Each time a tragedy happens, they start looking out for the new members of the worst club in the world, reliving what happened to them as they try to stop the past from repeating itself. “It was just a band of thieves who siphon off money from good people trying to help people,” Tom Teves says. In 2016, then-Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman formed a group through the AG’s Offi ce of Community Engagement to discuss problems with this state’s response to mass tragedies. The attorney general is responsible for consumer protection, and the offi ce had found examples of people using mass tragedies as an excuse to start fundraisers that did not ben- efi t the victims, Coffman explains. And even when intentions were good, the AG’s group determined that there should be a way to get the money out immediately, through an orga- nization that was outside of the government. “After working 25 years in government, I didn’t want it to be at the mercy of a budget process in the legislature,” Coffman says. “I didn’t feel like that was fair, so we chose to make it separate.” The AG’s offi ce hired an outside attorney to do the necessary legal work to set up the Colorado Healing Fund so that it would be a separate entity from that offi ce, then started the program with $1 million from the AG’s budget. “We used money to seed the Colorado Healing Fund that came from what’s called custodial funds,” Coffman says. “They are monies that are a result of settlements of lawsuits in Colorado on behalf of the people of Colorado, and the Attorney General’s Of- fi ce puts those monies in the state treasury but holds them in an account that is to be used for purposes such as this.” By 2018, the Colorado Healing Fund was up and running, with Coffman as the board chair. “The feeling was that since our offi ce had founded it, I would chair it for the fi rst years of its establishment,” Coffman says. Her offi ce created a process where people could write proposals and apply for funding; her staffers would do an evaluation of the request and come to her only for a fi nal signature, she says. Coffman only served as AG for one term (she made an unsuccessful run for the Re- publican nomination for governor in 2018), but remained as chair of the Colorado Heal- ing Fund, which hired Finegan as its sole employee in 2019. Sadly, the tragedies kept coming. For the Healing Fund to activate, an event must be indiscriminate and affect a large group of people, with three or more killed, according to Finegan, though there’s some fl exibility to those guidelines. For example, CHF activated after the STEM School shooting in May 2019 despite there being only one casualty, because the community was deeply impacted. The arrangement calls for collecting funds and working with COVA or another partner organization to distribute them. Vic- tims of a mass-casualty event are contacted by the police department in that jurisdiction, then assigned a victim advocate who works with the CHF partner to request money for a victim’s needs. Often, a victim does not even know that CHF has been involved. “We’re not the people on the ground,” Finegan says. “We recognize that those vic- tim advocates know what individuals need, what is coming up, how to support them at that time as quickly as possible with what- ever money we have.” But having those other agencies involved can add insult to injury, survivors say. Starr Bartkowiak’s daughter, Lonna Bart- kowiak, was one of ten people murdered at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive in Boulder in March 2021. Starr estimates that she received over $200,000 through victim assistance, including funds that she later learned were from CHF. And while she says she’s very grateful for that, she wonders if others received as much: She’s suspicious because CHF collected more than ten times the amount she received. In its most recent report about the King Soopers shooting, posted on its website last June, CHF says it gave about $3 million to COVA and $300,000 to the Boulder Strong Resource Center, a community mental health center in Boulder. It collected nearly $4.8 million, with just over $220,000 going to administrative fees. In the report, CHF says that the rest of the money will be used for long-term support. “They advertise on the internet that they are the best place to make sure that all of the donations that came in would go directly to the victim’s families, and that never hap- pened. And I never even got a phone call,” Bartkowiak says. Bartkowiak had no idea that CHF was us- ing her daughter’s name in fundraising efforts until months after Lonna’s funeral. She says she feels as though the organization laid in wait for a tragedy to begin fundraising, using her daughter’s murder — and those of the others killed at King Soopers — to support its mission rather than doing anything proactive. Now, after any mass-casualty event, Bart- kowiak researches whether funds are being properly distributed. She says it breaks her heart when the tragedy is in Colorado, be- cause she knows the pain CHF can cause. She had an ally in her fi ght: John Mack- enzie, whose wife, Lynn Murray, was also killed in the King Soopers shooting. Be- fore Mackenzie died last November, he and Bartkowiak had been working with Victims First, a network of surviving victims of mass- casualty crimes whose members include people close to victims of the Aurora theater shootings. Mikayla Medek, the cousin of its president, Anita Busch, died in that tragedy. The Teves and Busch had helped form the National Compassion Fund in 2013. After a mass tragedy, the NCF fi nds a local partner to host a fund that will give 100 percent of funds directly to victims, with no pass-through agencies, victim advocates or additional nonprofi ts involved. People can still donate to the Club Q Victims and Survivors Compassion Fund it set up. Because no one can understand the ex- perience of losing a loved one in a mass- casualty event unless it happens to them, no outside group should be directing how funds intended for victims are distributed, the National Compassion Fund says; any money collected should be divided evenly among victims’ families without any need to jump through any hoops. That way, the families will not have to fi g- ure out how to navigate any system, instead using that time to grieve, heal and situate themselves in their new normal. There is no straight path to recovery — or, as Bartkowiak points out, no real recovery at all. “They can’t imagine what we’re going through,” Bartkowiak says. “Nobody can, unless you’ve lost somebody that you love like that. They’re gone. What do you do? To this day, I have a hole in my heart that’s just fi lled with cement.” continued on page 12 Still Hurting continued from page 9 FACEBOOK FILE PHOTO Z Wililams (above left) and Erica Unger founded Bread and Roses; Cynthia Coffman pushed for the creation of the Colorado Healing Fund. ERIKA RIGHTER
