Not really music related but we know that a lot of you could use a good reason for cleaning out your closets! Here’s your “Start the new year off right” problem solver!!! By Amanda Horvath, Alexis Kikoen, RMPBS | As we settle into a January cold spell, the City of Denver is trying to shelter more than 4,500 migrants who recently arrived from the southern border. While the goal is to get people into stable housing, money to shelter families and individuals is running out and some worry people will end up in the cold.
One organization, Colorado Changemakers Collective, is gathering and distributing clothing donations including winter coats, something the migrants need desperately. While at a distribution event, Rocky Mountain PBS met one family from Colombia who shared their journey and their hopes for the future as they try to build a life here. You can read about their struggles and the latest plan from the City of Denver.
DENVER — A low chatter and steady hum of music filled a room as people looked through piles of clothes and jackets. The late December crowd was not a rush of holiday shoppers, but rather migrants who had traveled thousands of miles for a chance at a better life.
Madeleine Prissela Maza Lopez looked for a pair of jeans for her husband, Reinel Javier Pérez Peña. For more than two weeks, he had been wearing the same pair underneath a pair of thin sweatpants to ward off the cold, only taking them off to wash them.
Maza also looked for warm clothes for herself and their 3-year-old daughter, Mariangeli.
“To provide at least something that to us may be something small it could mean the whole entire world — a jacket can mean literally from living to death out there in the cold weather,” said Carlos Herrera, project manager with Colorado Changemakers Collective, one of the nonprofits that distributes donations to migrants.
The family, who most recently lived in Colombia, said they arrived in the United States on Dec. 1 after spending four months traveling thousands of miles from South America.
They said they were detained in El Paso, Texas for a few days before getting a bus ticket to Denver. Pérez then said the Denver Department of Human Services gave them a plane ticket to New York, hoping that city, with more resources, would be able to care for them.
But after arriving at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, the welcome center for migrants, officials there told Pérez and his family they didn’t have room for them, either. Officials in New York then bought them another ticket back to Denver.
Maza, Pérez and their daughter are among the more than 35,000 migrants who have arrived in Denver, a sanctuary city, within the last year.
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Currently, Colorado Changemakers Collective is focusing on providing coats, warm clothes, hats, gloves, shoes and some personal hygiene products.
“They’re coming here with basically nothing. They came from a very warm climate. This is a very harsh climate in comparison,” said Candice Marley, a Denver resident and executive director of budding nonprofit, All Souls Denver.
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If you’d like to donate clothing to Colorado Changemakers Collective, they ask that you call 720-385-9173.
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Go here to read the rest of this heart-wrenching story – and then clean out your closets:
https://www.rmpbs.org
A Call for HELP – RMPBS Pleads for the Community’s Help in Aiding Migrants
