LONGMONT, Colo. — The mission at Recovery Café Longmont is to be a community of refuge and healing for people in recovery.
The space that’s located in the basement area of CENTRALongmont Presbyterian Church supports adults as they rebuild their lives, working to break the cycle of break of homelessness, addiction and other mental health challenges.
“It’s essential. I would actually say it’s crucial,” said Jen Jepsen, executive director of Recovery Café Longmont. “I really think the work that we do here is some of the most important work that’s done and to be a place where people can make it be a second home.”
The nonprofit group is one of the more than 3,400 nonprofit organizations that are benefiting from the 14th annual Colorado Gives Day on Tuesday.
Recovery Café Longmont opened in 2019 after the success of the original Recovery Café, founded by Killian Noe in Seattle. The café in downtown Longmont has about 36 active members, serves about 100 people a year and hosts more than a thousand visitors annually.
“People who struggle with substance use, people who are struggling with trauma, with mental health struggles, are people who are just in a tough patch,” Jepsen said. “To have a place where you can come and people are like, ‘Hey, it’s OK. I gotcha … it's good’.”
The café offers a variety of activities like arts, bilingual meditation and support groups. The groups are run by peer support specialists who are in recovery themselves.
Elyssa Hamilton is one of the specialists, and she said it's shared experiences that helps people engage.
“The best person to help someone through a really hard time is someone who has been there themselves, so there’s this automatic feeling of empathy,” Hamilton said. “In a place like this, where we have someone on their first day or someone with 10 years of recovery, we all have something that we’re passing on to each other.”
Colorado Gives Day is powered by ColoradoGives.org – a year-round website featuring Colorado nonprofit groups. The program encourages people to "give where you live" and allows people to choose nonprofit organizations that appeal to their passions.
“Our number of visitors in 2022 compared to the previous year more than doubled, so we’re continuing to have more demand for our services,” said Virginia Choung, Recovery Café Longmont director of philanthropy. “To run our organization is about a half a million dollars a year, and we are continuing to expand our services, and so that’s why Colorado Gives Day is so important to us.”
This year, Colorado Gives Day will have an incentive fund worth more than $1 million provided by the Colorado Gives Foundation, FirstBank and other community members.
The fund is proportionally allocated to each nonprofit group that receives donations. If an organization receives 1/10 of the total giving on Colorado Gives Day, it will get 1/10 of the incentive fund, meaning every organization that receives a gift on Colorado Gives Day gets an added boost.
“One of the things that we have to do is make sure that we’re paying a decent wage to our people,” Jepsen said. “It’s not easy to live in Colorado, and we want to make sure that they have benefits, and we want to make sure that they’re being taken care of as well so then that therefore they can take care of others.”
The group recently launched a satellite circle where they visit a local halfway house to provide their services and are looking to partner with other nonprofit agencies throughout the community. Jepsen said she loves the way the community rallies around the café.
“What I love about Recovery Café is the community that is built here,” Jepsen said. “It just enables us to continue that programming and to continue to be that place of bravery and safety for people to be able to come here and be.”
For more information about Colorado Gives Day, click here: https://www.coloradogives.org/.
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