Denver Homeless and Youth Service Provider Frustrated by Holdup at Globeville Rec Center

Pastor Bryan Sederwall opened the Denver Dream Center at 2165 Curtis Street almost six years ago to help Denver’s homeless, youth and formerly incarcerated. However, he feels like most of the city didn’t know about the nonprofit until Denver Parks & Recreation kicked the Birdseed Collective, another community service group, out of the Globeville Recreation Center to make way for his organization.

“The community is confused,” Sederwall says. “If they don’t know the Dream Center, then it makes it seem like Birdseed got kicked out and we’re part of that. We’re just a pawn on the chessboard. We just want what’s best for the community.”

In November, Parks & Rec told the Birdseed Collective to pack up despite hosting food banks, Aztec dancers and after-school programs in the Globeville Rec Center since 2018. Its lease is to be handed over to the Dream Center — but despite early efforts to rush the Birdseed Collective out, the Globeville Rec Center has been empty since January because Denver City Council hasn’t approved the new lease.

“Because Parks & Rec did a horrible job at getting somebody in there, I don’t blame anything on the Denver Dream Center. It’s not their fault that they’re in a bad situation, too,” says Anthony Garcia, the founder of the Birdseed Collective. “Just the fact that we have another organization moving into our neighborhood that’s helping out with resources is extremely helpful and takes a lot of weight off what we’re doing.”

The Denver City Council Parks, Art and Culture committee approved the Denver Dream Center’s $90,000, three-year lease on April 7, but it’s still not the full council’s agenda for a final vote yet. During a public meeting on April 7, a Parks & Rec staffer told councilmembers that the department was still working to get the building “back up to standard,” adding that Birdseed left the rec center in “good condition, but there were things that needed to be improved.” Parks & Rec has not responded to a request for comment for this story.

Sederwall is worried that Birdseed’s loss will cast the Denver Dream Center in a bad light, hindering donations, but he’s also disappointed that the Globeville Rec Center has sat empty for nearly four months, all while two organizations eager to serve the community can’t do anything to help.

“People get caught up, and they don’t even know what’s real. They just hear a person got kicked out,” Sederwall says. “What sucks is it’s now April, and that center has been closed since December. Now you’ve got a space that’s not being used for anyone. We could be five months into the beginning of something.”

At the same time, the Denver Dream Center is having trouble affording its home base in the Ballpark District. Since 2021, the Denver Dream Center has operated out of a two-story, former commercial garage in an area clustered with organizations serving homeless residents, including the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, the Samaritan House Shelter and the Denver Rescue Mission.

According to Sederwall, the Denver Dream Center ended 2025 with a $3.5 million budget, but he has cut ten staff members and his own pay this year “to keep the lights on” and afford monthly rent, which is about $60,000, he says. Due to the city’s recent budget cuts and losing competitive contracts, the Dream Center has lost $1.6 million in city funding that it had received in the past, including $500,000 to support Denver parolees and people leaving incarceration, and $1.1 million to connect homeless residents downtown and in Capitol Hill to housing and resources.

The Denver Dream Center has no active contracts with the City of Denver. All of its operating budget is funded by donations, according to Sederwall, and those donations will determine if they continue at the Curtis Street location and pay $30,000 annually for the next three years to expand into the Globeville Rec Center.

“We’ve had contracts on and off, but we’re 100 percent right now self-supporting. It puts us in a really unique position because we’re not funded by the city; we don’t have contracts or grants. We fundraise from individual donors,” Sederwall says. “We’re paying. They’re not paying us to come in there. We’re paying the city out of money that I have to raise from individual donors. We’re paying the city $90,000 so that we can come [to Globeville] and provide free services.”

Ballpark Beginnings

Sederwall is an ordained minister with Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. An Illinois native, he worked as a youth pastor in Florida before moving to Colorado twenty years ago to be part of the Red Rocks Church, a new church at the time founded by his cousin. He soon felt driven to serve a larger need in Denver, he says, but “another Sunday sit-and-music church, that’s not what the people need.”

According to Sederwall, he’s been organizing community services around Denver for the past two decades. The term “dream center” comes from an organizational model out of Los Angeles for faith-based nonprofits specializing in forms of community service and engagement. Sederwall says there are about fifty or sixty Dream Centers throughout the United States with different missions, with some operating as the outreach arm of a church, others as food banks and a handful providing youth services.

He opened the Ballpark location after seeing homelessness worsen amid the pandemic, pointing to an encampment built up around a downtown U.S. Post Office to the point of becoming a “skid row” in 2023. When Mayor Mike Johnston took office in July 2023, his office estimated that around 300 people were living there.

Johnston promised to end Denver homelessness in his first term; he started by declaring homelessness an emergency to push through contracts with service providers faster. In December 2023, the mayor focused on clearing encampments in and around the Ballpark District with help from an emergency contract with the Denver Dream Center to help move people out of tents and match them with resources.

“A lot of our teams went out to break down the encampments, but we tried to do it with dignity,” Sederwall says. “We walk out with coffee or water or resources. We try to get people’s names. I want to know their story. If we can identify if they’ve got a family, we want to get them back to family.”

Three years later, the area has staved off the return of the large encampment since Johnston’s sweeps. In 2024, property and business owners nearby voted to raise neighborhood taxes to create a Ballpark general improvement district. One of the key services of the Ballpark GID is contracting with the Kentucky-based nonprofit Block-by-Block to employ “ambassadors,” the people seen around Coors Field wearing orange maroon gear, picking up trash and telling homeless residents to get out of the way of business entrances and sidewalks.

“They’ll do the interaction, but they’re not the case managers,” Sederwall notes about the ambassadors. The Denver Dream Center also deploys volunteers on “foot patrols,” he says, “where our guys walk with police officers to engage the community.” Sederwall also tries to host regular “coffee with a cop” events, where former gang members are invited to chat with uniformed police officers.

The core of Dream Center’s services — performed with fourteen staff members and as many as 20,000 temporary volunteers a year, Sederwall estimates — still focuses on serving a mix of youth, homeless and formerly incarcerated residents returning to society. On Wednesday, April 15, elementary school students from Cherry Hills Christian School showed up at the Denver Dream Center to hand out free meals and clothes to homeless residents, eat and chat next to former convicts; children also played checkers and Connect 4 with Dream Center volunteers, many of whom used to be homeless or incarcerated.

Frustrations in Globeville

In March, Jolon Clark, the director of Denver Parks & Rec, told City Council that his department is trying to maximize profits from city-owned facilities by opening them up to the best bidders. Along with the Birdseed Collective, Parks & Rec has booted an LGBTQ swim team out of its public pools and Volunteers of Outdoor Colorado out of a historic bathhouse despite spending out $1 million to improve it.

The Birdseed Collective relocated to a new space in the Tepeyac Community Health Center, 5075 Lincoln Street, in January. “We’re trying to figure out day by day,” Garcia says, as they’re still adapting programming to the new space. Most of the rooms the nonprofit is working with were created for medical examinations, and don’t offer space for the same cultural and fitness programs that Birdseed hosted in the Globeville Rec Center gym.

“We’ve been struggling,” Garcia says. “We did lose a lot of our participants. A lot of our programs that we did revolved around the people that were using the gym space, like kids whose parents were doing Zumba, or a lot of the Aztec dancers. We lost out on a lot of those participants.”

Sederwall can’t help but feel “used” by the city.

Despite a tight financial situation, Sederwall says expanding the Denver Dream Center wants “to enhance the rec part of the [Globeville] rec center” and move youth and sports programs currently hosted at Argo Park, which is in the neighborhood, into the facility’s gym. He adds that the Denver Dream Center has connections to the neighborhood through its work with formerly incarcerated Globeville residents.

“We do a lot of community programs, and we do a lot of youth and sports programs,” he says. “We’re loosely connected to that community, so when the rec center became available, we put our hat in the ring. Now, it seems like not enough community conversations were had.”

Garcia is “still upset about the way it went down with Parks & Rec,” and feels like the city is “pitting small organizations like us or the Dream Center against each other, having to compete for spaces and money.” He’s trying to find out more about the Denver Dream Center, as they’ll only be up the street from each other after the Dream Center moves into the Globeville Rec Center as expected.

“Parks & Rec did whatever they want to do, but I wish the best for [the Dream Center],” Garcia says. “We’re going to continue to try to work with them, considering we’re next-door neighbors, basically.