Aurora Tried to Redirect Panhandling Donations to a City-Run Charity. Three Years Later, How’s That Going?

Aurora has been trying to discourage homeless residents from asking passing motorists for money by posting signs throughout the city reading “Give Real Change,” and encouraging donations to a city-related charity instead. But after three years, the campaign is still struggling to create significant change.

Along some of Aurora’s most trafficked roads, including Iliff and Mississippi avenues and by Interstate 225 ramps, signs ask motorists to “help reduce panhandling,” and suggest that drivers “donate to the Spirit of Aurora and support those in need” instead of handing people money directly.

“I get that the tug on the heart is real,” says Aurora City Councilmember Steve Sundberg, who spearheaded the campaign to divert money to Spirit of Aurora and away from panhandlers. “I would hope that [people] see that signage, think twice to give to the organizations of their choice and, maybe, cause these folks to not be so comfortable on a street corner or living on the street but look to services that can really help them get back on track in life.”

Spirit of Aurora is a nonprofit created by the city in 1989 to collect tax-deductible donations for Aurora coffers. Give Real Change contributions are passed on to the Aurora Department of Housing and Community Services, which handles homelessness resolution for the city and operates with an annual budget of about $25 million.

Aurora installed the panhandling-discouraging signs about three years ago at a cost of about $26,000. But from late August 2022 to August 1 of this year, only about $7,000 in individual donations have been collected by Give Real Change, according to the city.

When the project was proposed to Aurora City Council in August 2022, Sundberg and co-sponsor Angela Lawson brought it forward without taking it through any policy committees, which would have allowed for more discussions and amendments. However, the proposal was still passed, 6-4, by the mostly conservative council, with Sundberg holding up a cardboard sign reading “Help Reduce Panhandling (God Bless)” during the meeting.

According to a list of Give Real Change donations in 2024 and 2025, most of the money collected over the last two years came from people making monthly donations of between $9 and $510, and most of the regular subscribed payments were around $50 or $500, far more than most people think about giving to panhandlers. Although money donated to Give Real Change goes through two sets of middlemen, Spirit of Aurora promises the nonprofit takes nothing out of the donations.

Data from the Aurora Police Department shows that the number of people charged with panhandling-related crimes has steadily increased since those signs were installed.

Because panhandling is protected free speech under the First Amendment, asking for money in public in Aurora isn’t illegal unless it’s done next to a road or in a threatening way. Joe Moylan, an APD spokesperson, says that Aurora has laws prohibiting panhandlers from approaching drivers in public and from “aggressive begging,” which is defined as a person touching, threatening, following or using foul language towards another while asking for money in a public place.

The panhandling that motorists are most likely to encounter on Aurora’s streets is considered “solicitation on or near a street or highway” under city statutes. During the latter half of 2022, when the “Give Real Change” signs went up, Aurora reported two cases where someone was charged under that roadside solicitation statute, according to Aurora Police Department data. The next year, that count went up to 22 cases. In 2024, it increased to 33 cases, and as of September 20, the count for 2025 is up to 55.

In an email to Westword, Aurora Councilwoman Alison Coombs, who has opposed the campaign since 2022, says that Give Real Change is only “addressing a symptom (panhandling),  not the underlying causes (economic insecurity,  exploitation by bad actors).”

“No amount of arresting people (or discouraging folks from handing them a dollar) will make them economically secure or less vulnerable to exploitation,” Coombs says. “In fact, citing people who are homeless and have no way to pay or get to court is at best a waste of police time that just temporarily moves people along. At its worst,  it causes more problems for individuals who end up with a failure to appear charge and get arrested as a result.”

Does Keeping Your Change Create Change?

Sundberg says Give Real Change is still worth the investment for a few reasons, but mostly because residents want the city to take action to stop panhandling, he says.

“Visiting with residents in our area, they don’t want to see aggressive panhandling on our streets,” he says. “It can be dangerous with someone on a very narrow median or walking in between cars. That’s feedback I’ve received.”

Sundberg says that when he started pushing the campaign, the APD told him that homeless residents who’d set up an encampment near I-225 and East Iliff Avenue that officers cleared out were making $40 an hour or more from panhandling.

“Apparently, it can be lucrative at certain spots within our city,” Sundberg says. “And it seems like it’s hard for some of these folks to give it up.”

As enforcement of panhandling laws has gone up, Sundberg adds, he’s seen less of it in his part of Aurora. Sundberg owns Legends, a sports bar on East Iliff Avenue, only a few yards from a “Give Real Change” sign located near an I-225 overpass, and he says he’s noticed “fewer panhandlers” there. Four “Give Real Change” signs are posted along East Iliff, including at intersections with Chambers and Buckley roads and Blackhawk Street.

But what Sundberg stresses above all else regarding the Give Real Change campaign is that it was designed as an educational campaign to let people know “what’s permissive and not permissive” in Aurora, and meant to be “reflective” of the city’s “work-first” approach to solving homelessness.

While cities like Denver under Mayor Mike Johnston have chased a “housing-first” model, in which people are rushed by the hundreds into hotel shelters and micro-communities, Aurora and other municipalities want to require homeless residents to gain employment and seek out services themselves if they’re going to live in publicly funded housing. Sundberg says that Give Real Change was meant to put pressure on homeless residents to help themselves at a time when Aurora was setting out on that work-first path.

“We want people to have an abundance of resources available to them, but not allow them to do whatever the heck they want to do — camp anywhere, for example,” Sundberg says. “Maybe it creates a degree of discomfort for a person to lean less on panhandling and lean more upon services that can get them back on track in life or get back to work.”

Even if Aurora isn’t winning the battle against panhandling, the work-first model does seem to be winning the war of opinion at the federal level. In June, President Donald Trump diverted federal funding for homelessness away from housing-first cities, like Denver, and directed them towards cities that favor strict enforcement against public camping and “long-term institutional settings” for homeless residents with mental-health issues. During an interview with Colorado Public Radio published on September 12, Governor Jared Polis said that the housing-first model and “a lot of what Denver has been doing has not been working.”

“I think Aurora and Colorado Springs have been better on their approach to homelessness,” Polis said. “When they say ‘housing first,’ sometimes that means even when there’s an underlying drug addiction or mental health [problem], you focus on just the housing. It doesn’t always work. It doesn’t work, perhaps, even most of the time.”

Denver once tried a program similar to Get Real Change. In 2007, the Denver’s Road Home program attempted to reduce panhandling by posting old parking meters around town, including on the 16th Street Mall, to collect spare change to fund homelessness services. The meters reportedly brought in $200,000 by 2013 for Denver’s Road Home before being removed sometime after 2017, but not before Denver was credited with inspiring other cities around the country to follow suit. In 2024, the Denver Police Department handed out about 43 tickets for panhandling in traffic, according to city data.

Aurora will rely on its work-first model to structure operations at the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus, a facility opening in November in a former hotel near Denver Internatoinal Airport that will provide certain services and 255 beds for homeless residents. Anyone can stay one night at the campus, but they can stay long-term only if they work with a case manager to secure a job and, if necessary, get treatment for addiction or mental-health issues.

Although Aurora City Council didn’t approve the $26 million purchase of the campus until 2024 (mostly with state funding), Sundberg says the Give Real Change campaign launched in anticipation of work-first housing opening down the line; the intention was also to get the public to trust that the city had a plan and enough resources to get homeless residents on the path towards self-sufficiency.

“Panhandling wouldn’t be good for that,” he adds. “They needed to get out of that and into a guided pathway to support. It’s taking a while for some plans to come to fruition, but there’s less reason for people to be on the streets in Aurora, Colorado.”