Two new short-term safehouses set to open in metro Denver in early 2025 will be the only facilities in the state to offer emergency shelter beds reserved for survivors of sex trafficking.
One of those safehouses, operated by HER Campaign, is expected to open in January, while a second, run by Covered Colorado, plans to open in March. Both nonprofit organizations will accept women immediately after they come out of sex trafficking and will focus on short-term stabilization and care.
The two organizations together expect to eventually offer short-term shelter for up to 20 women at a time in the Denver area. The Denver Post is not identifying the homes’ exact locations to protect the privacy of the women who will live there.
“That’s going to fill a pretty big gap,” said Johanna Spille, executive director of Covered Colorado.
Currently, across Colorado, there are four long-term recovery homes for women and one for girls who survive sex trafficking, but no emergency shelters set aside solely for human-trafficking survivors, either for sex or labor trafficking, said Katlyn Pryshlak, hotline and advocacy manager at the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking, which runs Colorado’s 24/7 trafficking hotline that connects callers to help.
Human trafficking includes both sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Sex trafficking involves coercing a person into engaging in commercial sexual activity, while labor trafficking involves coercing someone into performing labor.
Beds reserved for sex-trafficking survivors in Colorado are limited and services for labor-trafficking survivors are even more sparse, Pryshlak said.
There are also a number of existing safehouses that work with both survivors of domestic violence and survivors of human trafficking, she said, noting that safehouses are different from shelters because they accept people who experienced abuse, not merely people who are unhoused.
“Emergency shelter is the most commonly requested resource on the hotline and also one of the toughest to find for people because there are simply not enough beds in safehouses across the state to meet demand,” she said in an email.
Covered Colorado’s new safehouse will house up to six women for up to 30 days once it opens, Spille said. The organization was founded in 2017 and in January 2023 launched a two-year residential program for survivors of trafficking. The short-term home will be in addition to that longer program, which will have eight beds.
HER Campaign’s shelter will start with space for seven women, then expand to house up to 14 women after an initial start-up period, executive director Britney Higgs said. Women can stay for up to eight weeks, and the program focuses on both physical and mental recovery, with both a registered nurse and clinical social worker on staff.
“So they’ve been trafficked, they’ve been abused, they’ve been raped,” said McKenzie Gibson, a registered nurse who will be HER Campaign’s program director in Denver. “And we’re now in the climactic situation in which I’m talking the trauma down, and this is kind of like walking forward, that piece of the healing journey after.”
In Colorado, local law enforcement agencies investigated just under 200 cases of sex trafficking between 2020 and 2022, according to the Colorado Human Trafficking Council. Criminal charges for human trafficking were filed in 69 cases statewide in that time frame, most in metro Denver, the council reported in its 2023 annual report, the most recent available.
Finding housing is one of the top issues for people who are coming out of human trafficking, said Amanda Finger, executive director of the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking.
The state needs more low-barrier facilities where survivors can find housing without jumping through onerous hoops or meeting strict eligibility requirements, she said, noting that some shelters may require clients to profess a certain faith, pass regular drug tests, or meet other specific requirements.
At HER Campaign, the goal is to meet women where they are and help them figure out what they want, Higgs said. HER Campaign is a Christian organization but accepts women regardless of their religious beliefs, she said.
“From the moment they walk through the door, hospitality comes first,” she said. “We are meeting the person as a human being who has invaluable worth, and we just want them to see that. And it’s like, ‘OK, you are struggling? Great, let’s come alongside you. We’ve all struggled. Let’s just help you to get to wherever you are wanting to go.’ ”
The organization’s sprawling safehouse features high ceilings and bright, airy rooms flooded with natural light. The home is designed to give women choice and control over their environment, even on small details, like whether the shades should be open or closed, Higgs said.
She wants HER Campaign’s home to stabilize people so that they don’t end up repeatedly cycling through residential care providers. The nonprofit runs a similar safehouse in Montana that is temporarily closed because of a lack of funding. Higgs expects to reopen it in the spring.
The Denver safehouse, which costs about $1.4 million annually to run, is funded through nonprofit The Avodah Collective, which paid for the home’s first year of operational costs and will partially pay for the next two years while HER Campaign ramps up other funding.
For Shalene, 35, a sex trafficking survivor who went through the Montana program, Higgs’ approach ended 10 years of active addiction and cycling through treatment programs, she said. She spoke on the condition she be identified only by her first name because of safety concerns. She’s now been sober for three years.
“They didn’t expect me to perform a certain way, and when I realized they weren’t like that, it was hard for me,” Shalene said. “But I was able to figure out what kind of person I was, because I didn’t have to do these things in order to stay there. They allowed me to figure out who I was and what kinds of things I liked. Just learning how to be myself.”
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