Denver Community Services Provider Frustrated by Holdup at Globeville Rec Center

Pastor Bryan Sederwall opened the Denver Dream Center almost six years ago, with the goal of helping youth, homeless individuals, and formerly incarcerated people. But he thinks most of the city didn’t know about the nonprofit until Denver Parks & Recreation booted the Birdseed Collective, another community service group, out of the Globeville Recreation Center, which it had operated since 2018; the Dream Center got the contract instead.

That contract has yet to be approved by Denver City Council, though, and the Globeville center has been empty for months, with all activities on hold.

“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 — which had hosted food banks, after-school programs and more at the Globeville center for seven years — that its lease would not be renewed, and it had to get out by the end of the year.

“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, 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.”

Denver City Council’s Parks, Art and Culture committee approved the Denver Dream Center’s $90,000, three-year lease on April 7, but the deal has not yet been scheduled for a vote by the full council. During the April 7 meeting, 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.”

In the meantime, though, Sederwall is worried that the switch will cast the Denver Dream Center in a bad light, hindering donations. He’s also disappointed that the Globeville Rec Center has sat empty for four months, while two organizations eager to serve the community can’t do anything to help.

“Denver Parks and Recreation and the Dream Center have been working collaboratively to finalize a contract that best serves the community. While the procurement process took longer than anticipated, this partnership has been driven by the goal of providing residents with a wide range of community-based services,” says a Parks & Rec spokesperson.

“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 at 2165 Curtis Street. Since 2021, it’s 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. 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, he says, 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 currently has no active contracts with the City of Denver. Its operating budget is funded by donations, according to Sederwall, and those donations will determine if the nonprofit continues at the Curtis Street location and also pays the city $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 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, adding that “another Sunday sit-and-music church, that’s not what the people need.”

According to Sederwall, the “dream center” concept comes from an organizational model in Los Angeles for faith-based nonprofits specializing in forms of community service and engagement. He 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 Denver Dream Center in the Ballpark neighborhood after seeing homelessness worsen amid the pandemic, pointing to an encampment built around a downtown U.S. Post Office that became a “skid row.” 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 in order to push through contracts with service providers. In December 2023, the mayor focused on clearing encampments around the Ballpark District; an emergency contract with the Denver Dream Center helped move people out of tents and matched 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 no large encampments. In 2024, property and business owners nearby voted to raise neighborhood taxes in order 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. The Denver Dream Center deploys its own 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, eating and chatting with former convicts. Students also played checkers and Connect 4 with Dream Center volunteers, many of whom were formerly 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. Like the Birdseed Collective, Volunteers of Outdoor Colorado is getting booted from a historic bathhouse in Washington Park despite spending $1 million to improve it.

The Birdseed Collective relocated to a new space in the Tepeyac Community Health Center, at 5075 Lincoln Street in Globeville, in January. “We’re trying to figure out day by day,” Garcia says, as they’re still adapting programming to the facility. 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 who 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.”

Despite a tight financial situation, Sederwall says the Dream Center wants “to enhance the rec part of the rec center” and move youth and sports programs currently hosted at Argo Park, which is in the Globeville neighborhood, into the facility’s gym.

“We do a lot of community programs, and we do a lot of youth and sports programs,” Sederwall 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.”

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

For his part, Garcia says he’s “still upset about the way it went down with Parks & Rec,” adding that it feels like the city is “pitting small organizations like us or the Dream Center against each other, having to compete for spaces and money.

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