12 FEBRUARY 16-22, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | In addition to the severity of a tragedy, CHF considers whether people are willing to give before it activates a response. “A key piece for us is, we activate our seed fund so we can get money out as quickly as possible, but we also have to pay attention to what’s coming in that we’re able to give out,” Finegan says. After the Club Q shootings, she notes, CHF could tell by the next day that it would have enough donations to make cash dis- bursements to families through COVA. According to CHF, it can get money to people faster than any other organization because of its seed fund, which it replen- ishes with donations to match the amount it initially gives out. But that wasn’t the case after the Decem- ber 27, 2021, shootings, in which a gunman murdered fi ve people, some of whom he’d targeted because of personal grievances. Chief among those killed were members of the city’s tattoo community, including Alicia Cardenas and Alyssa Gunn Maldonado, who were killed at Sol Tribe, Cardenas’s shop. People connected to Sol Tribe collected gift cards to give out immediately to those impacted. That was one of the tactics that Williams and Bread and Roses pushed after the Club Q shooting, too, while they gathered information specifi c to the victims’ needs. “There was this idea of, we’re experts in responding to mass shootings, and all people who are impacted by mass shootings are the same,” Williams says. “Every group is different. Even if you take all the people who were in the room that night, each one of them is different, and there’s no one person that speaks for all of them.” After the Club Q shooting, for example, there was an urgent need for chest binders, which are wraps or sports bra-like attire that transgender men and nonbinary people sometimes use to masculinize their chests. In an emergency, binders sometimes need to be cut off for medical treatment, or they may be damaged in the chaos. And those unfamiliar with this gender-affi rming prac- tice may ignore the very real need for quick replacements. “Someone from one of these institutions, when we said people are needing binders urgently, they said, ‘Oh, like from Offi ce Depot?’” Williams remembers. Others more familiar with the community got involved. Good Judy Garage, a queer- owned-and-operated auto service and re- pair shop that opened in Denver in 2021, hosted a fundraiser with an original goal of $5,000; it has raised almost $1 million. Faith Haug, who co-owns Good Judy, says it was important for the garage to support another queer-owned-and-operated business after the Club Q shootings. “Victims from other mass shootings nation- wide reached out and shared their experiences with me,” Haug says. “After hearing what other victims have gone through with other organi- zations, it was clear to me that partnering with the National Compassion Fund was the most ethical course of action to take.” It’s a misconception that CHF decides what is best for victims when it directs funds through nonprofi ts, Finegan responds, because all of the money collected goes to services that help people. CHF does not have reports readily available for donations connected to the tattoo shop shooting or the Mother’s Day 2022 shooting in Colorado Springs, in which seven people including the shooter were killed at a birthday party. Since the amount of money collected in connection with those events was smaller than the amount collected in Boulder, Finegan says the group’s primary focus has been accounting for the large amount of money donated for King Soopers shooting victims. For the Mother’s Day shooting, Finegan says the fund brought in $32,000 and gave out $75,000; it fi lled the gap with its seed fund. For the tattoo shop shootings, the fund brought in around $90,000 and gave out $50,000, with plans to disburse the rest for long-term needs. “That’s why there hasn’t been a report written, just because not much happened,” Finegan says. “I’m one staff person, and I’ve had three shootings that happened in one year, as well, so it was a lot.” In the beginning, the Colorado Healing Fund applied 5 percent of all donations to administrative costs. Last August, it raised that amount to 10 percent. Finegan says the increase was necessary for the solvency of the organization; it simply needed more funding to continue operating. “It has at times been diffi cult, because we tried to raise money to cover overhead and operations, and there’s just not a lot of private foundations that give for operating expenses,” Coffman notes. That increase just gave critics more rea- son to worry. Ultimately, an anonymous donor stepped forward to cover all of CHF’s administrative costs connected to the Club Q shooting response. But that didn’t comfort the critics. “My organization has been working very hard to try and share our concerns with the Colorado Healing Fund and push them to actually be transparent,” Williams says. “To make sure that 100 percent of money raised goes to the victims, which I think now is getting very deceptively messaged. They’ve said that they’re no longer taking 10 percent, but 100 percent of the money still goes to nonprofi ts, not to victims, and that’s a fundamental difference.” Victims First wrote an open letter about CHF in December. “By covering those ad- ministration costs,” it said, “the nonprofi t industrial complex has worked together, behind closed doors, to secure funds for nonprofi ts that were collected off the backs of mass shooting victims.” The complaints aren’t just about admin- istrative costs, though. Victims and their advocates charge that COVA, CHF’s usual partner, has often been insensitive at best, and sometimes harmful. COVA re-traumatized people by requir- ing that they list the name of the person who committed the crime on paperwork and also asking detailed questions about individual fi nances, they say. Victims complained that the form was too invasive and felt demean- ing at times, as if they had to prove that they deserve money. Mari Dennis took over as executive di- rector of COVA this fall. She says that the organization listened to those complaints, and implemented a change for the Club Q response. Previously, it had used the same form it had given victims of crimes that aren’t mass casualties when they requested support from a fund fi lled through grants, not CHF. “You have to gather so much information for your grant reports for federal funding,” Dennis says. “For these mass tragedies, we don’t have to do that, so that’s why I changed the form completely, just to get the exact information we need.” COVA’s form for mass casualties was changed to require only the name of the person in need, the name of the victim if the person in need is not the actual victim, the type of assistance needed and the amount requested. COVA doesn’t have to ask for approval from CHF for each line item, but people do need to specify what they are requesting the money for. “COVA kind of acts as a pass-through agency,” Dennis says, “because the Healing Fund can’t, by their own policies, be the ones to do this. They have to work with a nonprofi t. So because we’re already part- nering with the advocates that are doing the front-line work, then we can be that pass-through agency.” Finally, two months after the Club Q shoot- ings, the Colorado Healing Fund brought in the Community Health Partnership as a new navigator for those victims, while COVA continued to distribute funds. “The navigator will continue the work to fi ll critical gaps in victim support, par- ticularly for those who may face additional trauma in interacting with law enforcement and navigating processes and forms that are not LGBTQIA+-inclusive,” CHF said in a press release announcing the change. The Community Health Partnership is a nonprofi t that promotes partnerships to tackle health issues in Colorado. One of its focus areas is LGBTQIA+ health care. “Com- munity Health Partnership is continuing to work with any individuals that they can and will likely be a primary point with long term needs,” Finegan says of the partner- ship. “They are not replacing, they are just adding capacity.” But according to an open letter from Bread and Roses on February 7, the addi- tion hasn’t done much to fi x CHF’s Club Q response. “CHF’s model requires survivors to request money from orgs managing CHF dollars and requires survivors to justify ex- penses, and to gather and submit documents for each purchase and expense in order to access aid,” the letter says. “This process is invasive and time-consuming, and prevents survivors from planning long term, because they do not know when the next relief check is coming, or what will be covered.” The letter calls for CHF to immediately empty its Club Q fund and disburse it to the victims in a lump sum. And in fact, on February 10, CHF distributed an additional $1.3 million in donations, bringing the dis- bursements to $1.9 million out of 2.2 million collected. But according to Finegan, it needs to keep some funds for long-term needs. “That model is recommended by trauma experts because it is common for victims to dem- onstrate additional impact in the months and years following an incident,” CHF’s website notes in a response to the Bread and Roses letter. But how long will it wait? Williams says that CHF wasn’t responsive to victims’ re- quests for help on the one-year anniversary of the tattoo shop shootings, which would seem to qualify as long-term. “Some of the most important things we can do for survivors and victims’ families is honor their privacy and autonomy,” Wil- liams notes in a statement accompanying the Bread and Roses letter. “They know what they need.” Even as CHF has made some changes to its program, Coffman still believes in its basic mission. “We were told by all of the folks that we’ve worked with who’ve been through this, ‘You will be the lightning rod for complaints and for people who are psychologically injured as a result of the tragedy, and they’re angry because of their loss that can never be com- pensated for,’” she says. “I’m not gonna say it doesn’t hurt when people criticize us for the way that we’re doing things, because we’re there to help, but we also have the resolve that we know that what we’re doing is right, and we are able to help more people because of the policies and the mechanisms we have in place.” Email the author at [email protected]. Still Hurting continued from page 10 MICHAEL ROBERTS After the shooting at the Boulder King Soopers, CHF activated.
