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This is a transcript of a 12 minute radio interview on Issues Today with Joe Vazquez, the Executive Director of Springs Rescue Mission. The interview took place February 9, 2005. Issues Today plays on KXDC/KKCS.
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Interviewer: "Well, the Rescue Mission has been in our area for a long time. We're going to be talking today to Joe Vazquez, who is the Executive Director at the Springs Rescue Mission.
And Joe, good to have you with us today on the program."
Joe: "Thank you for having me. It's a great opportunity for us to be able to share our story."
Interviewer: "Well, very good, and I wanted to kind of go back to the beginning, and kind of share how you, how the Mission, did get started in the area here."
Joe: "Well, having been with the Mission since the beginning, the early days, there was just a local couple that was serving in their church, driving a bus, the local bus ministry, and they were attending Bible college and they wanted to just help folks locally. And they went and saw another mission in operation, and they started housing people in their basement, and serving meals in the parking lot across the street from the homeless shelter, and that's where we began."
Interviewer: "You know, that has been the key so many times, that so many of the really grass roots organizations have started with really the idea and the help of really one or two people. So, definitely the case with this too."
Joe: "Yes, it's been amazing to see what the Colorado Springs community is willing to do, and they're supporting us. It's totally, privately funded, everything that we do is all obviously free to the public and all of the operating funds that we have, and everything that gets done here, is free and it's all provided by our local community."
Interviewer: "Yeah, that's great, great to hear. Tell us some of the programs that you are providing at this point."
Joe: "Well, our three core programs center around providing meals to the public. We have a nightly service, and we do a free meal at the evening service, at 5:00 pm, Monday through Saturday. We do all the holiday meals at the Mission, or at the City Auditorium, where we feed over 1,000 people per meal at the major events, Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. And then the other holidays are smaller, but we do, in the warm weather we do outreaches in the park, we do barbecues, and we do our nightly service here, a lunch program, brown bag meals in the evening. And of course we have our recovery program, which is a 56-bed, in-house, 24-hour recovery program centered around counseling, job training, and life skills. We have an education center and case management for the men that enroll in that. It also has vocational training elements and then, of course, we have our emergency services. Where we're open three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 1:30 to 4:00 pm. Where we provide food boxes and clothing, furniture, bus tokens, gas vouchers and assorted other smaller items. But that's open three days a week to the public also."
Interviewer: "So really, you're serving all of the uh…., in many needs is what we're seeing here. Now, the meal program, that I'm sure takes a lot of volunteers. You have people from different churches that help you out, or how does that work?"
Joe: "Yes, we do have a volunteer coordinator on staff, and there are twelve of us running nine facilities. We have two part-timers, and so without volunteers there is no way we could accomplish the amount of work we do. But we use over 5,000 volunteers annually at this point. And we get them from a variety of either businesses or churches, service groups, or you know, just about anywhere we can get folks that want to come and help the homeless and the working poor. Because, unfortunately, a large percentage of the people coming to us for services are not literally homeless, living on the street, but they're just not making enough income to meet their own needs."
Interviewer: "Right, so they come by and I guess bring their families in a lot of cases, don't they?"
Joe: "Correct."
Interviewer: "Yeah, so that's an ongoing one and as far as the recovery mission that you're doing as well, tell us exactly how that program works as well."
Joe: "It's open the public, its minimum age is eighteen because of our restrictions, that are not our own guidelines, but the government restrictions. But they go through an interview process for two weeks, they're allowed to stay in Mission programs, and then the goal is to assess whether they would be a good fit for us. We get men from the veterans side of things, we get folks coming out of the prison systems, homeless, drugs, alcohol and other addictions and our goal is to get them here, and get them, these "things," out of their system and then start them on a path of preparing them to go back out at some point. We have, as I said, the education center, where they can get their GED and there are other assorted programs to continue learning computers, life skills and developing themselves, preparing resumes to be able to get back out there. And the vocational training programs, we have a culinary arts program, where men are training to become chefs. We have a print shop, a full service print shop, where they're learning on equipment, how to work in print shops, and mail room services. And then we have an auto detail shop, so a lot of different things in the automotive arena. And those are the ones we have at this point, but we're certainly working on developing others, because we get a lot of guys that have construction backgrounds. So we're looking at other things like that, where we can help them get back to employment."
Interviewer: "It isn't necessarily a detox program then, it's after they've been through the initial part and then come to you, is that correct?"
Joe: "Yes, if they show up intoxicated, we would be sending them to the detox center and they have to be there for 72 hours before we can take them in."
Interviewer: "Right, and so, that's great. So they're really learning life skills at that point, and skills that can help them to hopefully keep off any kind of the substances, drugs or alcohol or whatever it happens to be. So that's a positive."
Joe: "Yes, part of their time here, they're in a 12-step recovery program, and we also have individual and group counseling. We have a mentoring program that tries to partner them with a local Christian male that will certainly spend some time with them. So the goal is to start learning to get some new circles of friends that are not leading them into directions that are causing them to continue fail."
Interviewer: "Yeah, and that's one of the things that's very difficult, for unfortunately, when you have that close circle of friends sometimes it's hard to get away from that. But you really have to, in order to start your life over."
Joe: "Yes, any man that comes here, there's a 45-day no contact policy because they have to focus on their own recovery before they can even talk to their own families. Because, you know, the issues that are out there facing them and trying to support family or anything else, it's hard for them to stay focused on making themselves better so that they can go back out and participate and actually be functional and help be a part of the solution instead of being the problem. And if they can't focus on that, some people have a real struggle with that, but when they just spend those days, you know, concentrating on what it is that they want from their future, they can start seeing things in a much better light. When they're, you know, sober 45 days, or off of lifestyles that are certainly destructive, it helps in that process."
Interviewer: "Yeah, it really does and this is just men? Do you take women as well?"
Joe: "I'm sorry?"
Interviewer: "Do you take women as well?"
Joe: "Well, we don't have a women's recovery program here because there are some locally, and at this point we haven't found a need to have that as an additional program."
Interviewer: "OK, so it's for men, you can refer …
Joe: "Have you ever heard of a larger organization, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions? There are over 300 of these types of missions in the country and they all have a variety of different programs, but most of them center around recovery programs like this, and emergency services to the public. So we've been here, we're in our ninth year, and we live in a great city and we have a caring community that supports this type of work."
Interviewer: "Right, you also mentioned, I know you have the food, it's kind of a box give-away, did you say three days a week, I think you said?"
Joe: "Yes. The normal operations are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 1:30 to 4:00 pm, but then for all of the holidays, again, we give out pre-packaged holiday boxes. So at those times our numbers go up significantly, so people usually are seeing our advertising where we're trying to gather up the supplies to give out those boxes during the holidays."
Interviewer: "Right, now, and these all come from private donations? Do you go to the food bank and get this at all? Or.."
Joe: "We do have support from them and USDA, but a majority of the food we collect is through food drives that we do through churches and organizations, and our publications. We put out newsletters and advertisement, so people support those efforts by bringing not only food, but we take just about anything that's still serviceable. We have an auto donations program, and we take appliances. We're one of the larger appliance providers to the poor community. We also provide beds, good usable beds, clothing, furniture, baby items, computers, pretty much any office equipment and supplies, anything that's still usable. We do have trucks that will pick it up, if it is more than will fit in the back of a car."
Interviewer: "Oh great, so that's good to know as well. Well Joe, we're just about out of time, I wanted to give the phone number, I know you have a web site, and all the other things where people can get more information."
Joe: "OK, the Springs Rescue Mission is located at 5 W. Las Vegas, Colorado Springs, CO and our zip code is 80903. We are in the south downtown area. Our website is www.springsrescuemission.org and our phone number locally is 632-1822."
Interviewer: "Great, Joe Vazquez, thanks for talking to us, very good work going on in the community, and keep up the good work and we'll talk to you again."
Joe: "Appreciate it, thank you for your support and have a good afternoon."
Interviewer: "Thank you, Joe Vazquez, our guest from the Springs Rescue Mission."