The Delores Project announced plans Tuesday to open a permanent 75-bed shelter for women next year.
Mayor John Hickenlooper and others symbolically broke ground on the project Tuesday morning, applauding the effort as “morally sound and economically responsible” in helping the city get the homeless off the streets.
The group paid $350,000 for the vacant 6,100-square-foot building and will spend another $700,000 renovating it and adding a 2,000-square-foot addition, said Julie Duffy, one of the founders and the executive director of the project.
After operating out of a makeshift home for years, a handful of women committed themselves two years ago to finding a permanent home for The Delores Project.
They raised more than $500,000, then purchased a vacant building from the city that will be enlarged and renovated in time for this winter’s coldest months.
The Delores Project is an organization that has cared for homeless women for five years.
About half of the women who come to the shelter are victims of domestic violence or some type of assault. They are allowed to stay for free for up to three months, where they can live safely while attempting to get their lives straightened out, Duffy said.
Because of safety issues, the project has requested that the building’s location not be released.
The capital campaign got a kick-start a year ago when Cathlin Donnell, a prominent Colorado lawyer and interim U.S. attorney who died of breast cancer last year, bequeathed The Delores Project $250,000 to find a permanent home. She also pledged another $100,000 if the project could raise $500,000, which it has through additional donations from the Daniels Fund, the Boettcher Foundation and others.
Since January 2000, it has operated out of two leased buildings as an emergency shelter for up to 36 women.
Duffy and others named the shelter after a homeless woman named Delores.
“She was an example of a woman who fell through the cracks,” Duffy said. “She had been a victim of violence, very vulnerable. She died in the summer of 1999 on a bus bench after telling her friend she needed to rest. She was a diabetic. It was a blessing, to me, that she died that way and not as a victim of violence.”
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
