"Back during that time, I would do something we call a circuit. If you're homeless, you find resources," he says, describing a daily routine that involved locating one place to take care of personal hygiene needs and another place with wi-fi so that he could look for jobs.
24 Hour Fitness became where he showered. "Veterans — we had a pretty good deal," Manuel recalls. "Twenty bucks a month would get you full services at that time."
He spent his days at Starbucks. "I'd go to Starbucks really early in the morning, and I would kind of sit in the parking lot and make sure the young people who were coming in there to open the Starbucks...were safe," Manuel says. "I built up a rapport with a lot of the folks who worked there. They knew what was up, they knew I was homeless, but they never were mean to me or anything like that.
"We had a little bit of a deal going on," he adds. "There were a lot of young ladies who were opening up the Starbucks at 4:30 in the morning." After the employees got to know Manuel, they felt comfortable with him sitting in the parking lot, keeping an eye on things. In return for his security services, they'd give him a free cup of coffee when he came inside to spend the day job-hunting, filling out applications and doing interviews between the occasional errands.
At night, though, his routine was less stable. "You're really not fully asleep ever when you're homeless," Manuel says. After hearing about the shootings, safety was his first priority — finding a safe place to settle in for the night. He found one particular street where he'd try to park "because it was well lit, and it was highly patrolled, and it was safe."
Around midnight, after taking a shower at his gym, he'd head "back over to that area, because that's when it settles down — less traffic, less foot traffic," Manuel says. "I'd park somewhere under a tree with a little bit of shade so [people] can't look directly into the car and see me there, as opposed to parking under a light."
The people who lived on the block didn't always appreciate his presence, though, and sometimes called the police — "enough that I kind of figured out the patrol patterns," he says. One tap on the window was enough to jolt him awake. Fortunately, the police didn't give him too hard of a time.
"I used the veteran card," Manuel says, adding that often, "I saw the pin on their lapel, and I saw they were Army or Marine Corps, and I would kind of throw it out there that, 'Hey, I'm a veteran,' and then I would get the courtesy.
"Some of the cops I bumped into were veterans themselves, so they'd be like, 'Hey, come on buddy, you know you have to roll out.' Then they'd disappear. I think sometimes the cops might have not come back because they knew I was going to come back. So I just would wait until they circled the block, and then I would act like I was driving away the other way and give it about ten minutes and then go back."
Manuel's life became a blur. "Once you're homeless, you honestly lose track of time," he says. "There's pretty much this cloud around you, and the only things you think about are food, sleep, basic necessities.""Once you're homeless, you honestly lose track of time. There's pretty much this cloud around you."
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The circuit continued: Starbucks, gym, sleep (when and where he could), repeat. "I thought I was only out there for six months. I was out there for two years," he says.
At the end of those two years, he recalls, "I was at Starbucks, reading, going through newspapers and just jumping on the internet looking for jobs," when he happened to pick up a local newspaper and saw an ad for a job for a program manager working for the L.A. mayor's Gang Reduction Youth Development office.
He applied, interviewed, and got the job in March 2010.
"I remember the minute I got the job, I went to my car and slept for like twelve hours," he says. "I just parked under a tree in the park and just crashed."
A few months into his new job, Manuel was interviewing candidates for a position as a program lead with a GRYD initiative called Summer Night Lights, which was designed to pour resources into city parks during the hot summer evenings, when violence rates tended to increase.
One of the questions that the hiring team would ask: "What are some things that happen in communities that you would like to help with?"
In her answer, one candidate "was talking about homeless people in [her] neighborhood sleeping in their cars," Manuel recalls, and she said that "I just remember there was one time where we were calling the police on this one guy and he was in a blue car.'"
"When she mentioned the area she lived in, I was like, 'Yeah, that's the block I slept on,'" he says.
He didn't tell the woman that he was the homeless person who inspired her to call the cops. Instead, he ended up giving her the job. "It's one of those things in my mind that just helped me realize where I was and where I am," Manuel says. "I just said, 'Oh, snap, I was homeless six months ago, and now I'm interviewing this person for a job, and I was sleeping in front of their house.' It just kind of made it all clear to me. Like, yeah, I'm on the right path."
While Manuel was getting back on the right path, Denver was dealing with a growing homelessness problem. Under Denver's Road Home, the program introduced by then-Mayor John Hickenlooper in 2005, the city's homeless population had dropped from 10,157 to 4,809 by 2011, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But in 2012, the year after Mayor Michael Hancock took office, the number shot up to 6,358. And while it stayed level for the next several years, the homeless population began to grow again in 2020, during the pandemic.
That was the year that Hancock oversaw the launch of the STAR program — a widely lauded alternative emergency response initiative that sent mental health professionals, rather than members of the Denver Police Department, to low-risk incidents involving people in crisis.
But while STAR could deal with many situations related to people experiencing homelessness, a DPD response remained necessary for incidents involving a low-level crime.
According to DPD division chief Aaron Sanchez, while many of these low-level crimes couldn't be shrugged off, many officers didn't feel right about taking the perpetrators to jail. As the former commander of District 6 — which includes downtown Denver — Sanchez decided Denver needed a third option.
"This would happen almost every night," he recalls. "A person who's experiencing homelessness goes into a 7-Eleven...goes to the nacho machine and gets a scoop of cheese and chili, walks over, opens up a can of Coke, and sits down in the 7-Eleven and just eats it."
Describing that example as a "crime of need," Sanchez says, "we were looking for a place where we can remove the individual from 7-Eleven without necessarily taking them to jail."
Along with Armando Saldate, then the assistant deputy executive director of Denver's Department of Public Safety, Sanchez formed a committee with other people from the DPD, the Denver Sheriff Department and additional city officials to brainstorm ideas for that "third option."
Based on the concerns of Sanchez's officers in District 6, they decided that the city needed a space where all of the existing homelessness services could congregate. That way, a police officer could bring the person suspected of committing a "crime of need" straight to that spot, to be connected with any and every necessary service all at once.
When Saldate was appointed director of the Department of Public Safety in February 2022, the concept of such a one-stop shop was fast-tracked, and the Assessment, Intake and Diversion (AID) Center was created.
Because the AID Center was meant to coordinate the city's existing services rather than provide new ones, Saldate says he was looking for a director who would be best suited to building those relationships with service providers throughout the city.
After Saldate's chief of staff, Jeff Holliday, had narrowed the candidate pool for that position down to three people, Saldate came in to make the final decision. "We had two very highly qualified candidates. One was another national candidate that was doing this work back east. She was very impressive — went to an Ivy League school," recalls Saldate. A second candidate was local, and just as impressive.
"Wow, this is going to be really hard," Saldate recalls telling Holliday, who responded, "Well, wait until you meet the third candidate."
Armando Saldate heads Denver Department of Public Safety, and hired Carlon Manuel to run the AID Center.
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After getting his job in the L.A. mayor's office, Manuel had continued working with nonprofits, helping provide supportive services for homeless veterans through People Assisting the Homeless and working in getting involved with community colleges in the California state system. But his fiancée was planning to move to Denver, so he started looking for jobs in the area.
He found the AID Center post on LinkedIn and applied.
He was the third candidate Saldate interviewed. "This is going to be really easy," Saldate told Holliday after meeting Manuel.
He found the AID Center post on LinkedIn and applied.
He was the third candidate Saldate interviewed. "This is going to be really easy," Saldate told Holliday after meeting Manuel.
"Not only was he equipped with the skills that we wanted around knowing clinical best practice and practice around trauma-informed care, but what I really liked about him was just the ability that he had to engage with me and [Holliday], two high-level executives in the Department of Safety, in such a personal way," Saldate says.
"I think Carlon's story in particular is helpful to understand the intentionality that the Department of Safety put in...and how his hire has taken us to a good place where we're growing and people are buying in," he adds.
"It's funny, because when they told me I got the job, they said, 'When can you move?' I was like, 'Next week,'" recalls Manuel.
But when he showed up in Denver for his first day last August, the space at 1370 Elati Street that was supposed to become the AID Center was far from finished. "The walls were still being done," he remembers, and Holliday and Saldate "were like, 'Okay, here you go. Here's a canvas.'"
"You know, just trying to open up any kind of new entity, it's hard in government," Saldate explains. "So, obviously, we were acting with urgency because it's such a need for the community. We were at a community event, and [Manuel] met the mayor, and the mayor asked him, 'Hey, well, when is it going to be open?' and [Manuel] regrettably said, 'Well, it's going to be open in November.' Well, we hadn't committed to a date yet, because we had a lot of balls in the air, and me and [Holliday] said, 'You should have never said that, because the mayor's going to hold you to that.'
"It did put on pressure to get it open," he adds.
The challenge was "trying to get everyone committed to an idea," Saldate says. "You're having to ask people to have faith in the idea and that people will come." But Manuel met that challenge, he adds: "He proved himself almost right off the bat around his ability to engage with folks."
In fact, Manuel was indeed able to launch the center in November, though the official opening came a few months later.
"I call him our version of Coach Prime," Saldate says of Manuel, referring to Deion Sanders, the University of Colorado Boulder's new football coach. "He's basically done what Coach Prime is doing in Boulder with recruiting and getting folks involved and motivated about being part of the AID Center — and these are service [providers] that we normally didn't have good relationships with or any kind of established relationship with."
But Manuel put a lot of thought into making the place work. "You will see that everything is designed to focus on folks walking in the door," he says. "All the service providers are facing the door. The furniture itself...is facing the door. So we're not creating any barriers. If we had the service providers turned the other way, you'd see someone's back and shoulders; we wanted you to see a face when you walk in the door."
Those faces at the AID Center belong to representatives of organizations like WellPower, which provides community behavioral health care; CommunityWorks, which offers employment services; Volunteers of America Veterans' Services; and many more. A full schedule of the services available each week can be found online at the denvergov.org website.
The number and variety of services available in one place at one time is what makes the AID Center effective, according to Manuel. "We may have folks who are coming in just to get a bus pass sometimes, and then from that conversation during the intake, we find out that that person is looking for employment," he says. "So they're traveling all over the city looking for employment — we're like, 'Hey, we have three employers here, why don't you try to check them out? Go on back with CommunityWorks or [Community Employment Opportunities], and the other folks that we have here.'"
Since asking for help often makes people feel vulnerable, the more you can do for them in that moment, the better, he adds. The idea behind the AID Center is to create an "ecosystem of services," he says. "People that come in the door that have any type of need that we can help support, we try to support them."
Since it opened officially four months ago, the AID Center has served nearly 500 people, according to Kelly Jacobs, communications and strategy director for the Department of Safety.
Most of those have been walk-ins; Division Chief Sanchez says that the DPD has only brought eighteen individuals to the AID Center. But many of those who have walked in for services are people who might have committed more low-level crimes of need if they hadn't gotten help, he adds.
Still, the center faces challenges. Many of the non-violent crimes of need that might warrant a trip to the AID Center take place at night, when it's closed, Sanchez notes.
And even if the center is open, for legal purposes a crime must have occurred in order for an officer to justify detaining someone for the duration of the trip from the crime scene to the AID Center. But after a police officer drops someone off there, that person is free to go, notes Sanchez. Whether individuals choose to receive services is up to them.
"Once at the AID Center, there are no charges," Sanchez adds. "There is no paperwork; there is nothing held over the head of the individual. Once the officer brings someone to the AID Center, the case is closed from the perspective of the Denver Police Department."
Sanchez would like to see the center's hours extended. But even with the program's limitations, "in my opinion, it's been very successful," he says, adding that the high number of walk-ins reflects a growing awareness about the center among people who need it.
Manuel, meanwhile, says he's running out of space. "Every room in here is dual-purpose," he says of the center.
Jacobs says the eventual goal of the safety department is to open AID Centers at multiple locations throughout the city.
Cari Ladd, program manager for WellPower's Therapy Direct service, speaks glowingly of the AID Center as "a mall for social services." Therapy Direct provides virtual mental health urgent care, and also sends a representative to the AID Center each Thursday.
Ladd describes this on-site presence as an opportunity to "talk with the other community providers about the program and how to connect people to services," including the online options with Therapy Direct.
The AID Center even has computers available to access that program. "We're kind of able to be at the AID Center without having to staff it all the time," says Ladd.
Service providers aren't the only ones on board. In a city where crime and homelessness have long been top concerns for residents and leaders alike — and potential solutions for these issues have created deep political divides — everybody seems to like the AID Center and the work that Carlon Manuel is doing.
Whether it's the mayor, a police officer, a service provider or a person in need, according to Safety communications director Jacobs, "everyone agrees this is the right approach."
