News Briefs: Grand Junk Shun

Published August 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 7

Grand Junction saw an increase in homeless camps this year, some of them outside the usual areas along riverbanks, islands and bridges. In May, crews made up of jail inmates disposed of 15 of the camps and nine truckloads of trash in a vacant area of private property. Grand Junction Neighborhood Services, which is responsible for disposing of the camps, cites prevention of the spread of disease as the main reason for the cleanup.

The Rescue Mission of Grand Junction has 39 beds. The Homeward Bound Homeless Shelter has 87 beds during the winter months, and was just approved to increase their size to 130 beds; summer capacity is limited to 45.Homeward Bound in Grand Junction has said that more homeless people have been requesting service this year, and they have seen an increase in families with children needing help. Shelter demand in the city is outpacing supply.

—Sarah Harvey

News Briefs: Since the recession...

Published August 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 7

Homelessness in Colorado is on the rise. According to an annual homeless assessment report released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 14,747 Coloradans were homeless in 2008, 3.7 percent more than the number of homeless in 2007. BJ Iacino, spokeswoman for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, expects to see a much more dramatic increase when HUD’s 2009 study is published. Since the 2008 study was conducted, the CCH has seen an increase of over 20 percent in the number of newly homeless families seeking assistance. While nationally the number of homeless families seeking shelter increased by 9 percent, the number of homeless families seeking shelter in rural and suburban communities increased by almost 56 percent. Colorado not only has one of the highest concentrations of homeless people in the nation (.3 percent of its population), it is also one of only eight states where the number of unsheltered homeless was greater than the number of sheltered homeless.

—Sarah Harvey

News Briefs: Whistleblower at Cigna

Published August 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 7

After a year of hanging in the wings, Wendell Potter, former vice president of public relations at Cigna, is blowing the whistle on healthcare insurer practices that he says have crippled our system. At a June hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, Potter testified that Cigna regularly purged customers. Potter described purging as a routine practice in which underwriters would “jack up” already expensive insurance rates when a small business policy was up for renewal. The rates would be raised so high that employers would be forced to drop their policies. Chris Curran, a Cigna spokesman, denies the company engages in this practice.

Potter now serves as Senior Fellow on Health Care for the non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy. He supports legislation that would give people the opportunity of joining a government health care plan. Considering the current debate in both the public and in Congress, Potter said in an editorial column on CMD, “remember this:  whenever you hear a politician or pundit use the term “government-run health care” and warn that the creation of a public health insurance option that would compete with private insurers (or heaven forbid, a single-payer system like the one Canada has) will “lead us down the path to socialism,” know that the original source of the sound bite most likely was some flack like I used to be.”

—Sarah Harvey

Feature: Aftershock - Addressing secondary trauma in a setting mindful of both clients and service providers

Published August 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 7

by Mandy Walker
photos by Adrian DiUbaldo

Barbara molfese sits in her small office at the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center and remembers a client she counseled about an unintended pregnancy. The young woman, dressed in boys clothing, told Molfese about the incest and sexual assaults she’d experienced beginning when she was just five-years-old.

“You could just feel the pain sitting in a room with her,” said Molfese. “I felt heartbroken for her for the next couple of weeks. Sad, depressed. I just kept seeing her, picturing her in my mind.” Molfese, counseling supervisor and chaplain at the center, knew she was suffering from secondary trauma.

Like Molfese, Rene Brodeur, program director at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, can recall traumatic events, like attempted suicides or violence and the impact they’ve had on him. He also knows there are times when he can’t identify a single specific incident and yet has found himself experiencing secondary trauma.

Rene Brodeur, left, and Janet Walker of the Boulder Shelter for the homeless have a meeting along the trails west of the shelter.

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Feature: Wonder Valley

Published July 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 6

by William Hillyard
photos by Preston Drake-Hillyard

You might have passed through here, maybe.  Out for a drive with time on your hands, you might have taken the long-cut to the casinos of Laughlin, Nevada from the soulless sprawl of Los Angeles.

You’d have driven way beyond the outer reaches of suburbia, beyond its neglected fringe of citrus groves, past the outlet malls and the Indian casino, past remote Joshua Tree National Park and the Twentynine Palms Desert Combat Center, past the Next Services 100 Miles sign and any reason anybody really drives out this way.  You’d have blown through here at 60 miles an hour, probably, along a forgotten remnant of the old Route 66, its potholed and corrugated tarmac the only asphalt for miles.  If you were messing with your radio, fiddling with your phone, you might not have even noticed the grid of washboard tracks scraped from the sparse hardscrabble of greasewood shrubs in this nowhere corner of the Mojave Desert.  

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