Weekend Winter Release · Boulder, Colorado

When the Wrong People Lead, People Freeze

On winter weekends, roughly 150 people are required to leave the All Roads shelter at 8:00 AM and spend nine hours outside — even when temperatures sit around 18°F and no day shelter is available. This isn’t an accident. It’s a leadership choice.

Current practice
150 people · 18°F · No Day Shelter

Night shelter is provided, but weekend daytime hours are closed. Residents must wait until 5 PM to re-enter, with limited indoor locations open and no dedicated warming center.

Risk: Prolonged exposure at these temperatures increases the chances of hypothermia, frostbite, respiratory complications, and mental-health crises — especially for people already exhausted or medically fragile.

This page documents the problem and outlines concrete standards and steps Boulder can take to keep people alive and dignified during winter.

When Unqualified Shelter Leadership Endangers Boulder’s Unhoused Residents

On paper, Boulder has an emergency shelter. In practice, people are being pushed into dangerous weather on weekends because the people making decisions are too far from the cold they create.

This weekend, like many, roughly 150 unhoused residents will be released from the All Roads shelter at 8:00 AM into sub-freezing air, with no day shelter or dedicated warming center available. They will not be allowed back inside until 5:00 PM.

Shelter is treated as a night-only service, while daylight hours — and dangerous temperatures — are left to “figure it out.” That gap is not a natural law. It is a policy choice.

The Core Problem: The Wrong People Are Making the Rules

Emergency shelter isn’t just about beds and checklists. It is a mix of crisis response, public health, mental health care, harm reduction, and logistics in real time. When leadership is uneducated in these areas and disconnected from the lived realities of homelessness, policies become tidy in a spreadsheet and disastrous on the street.

Releasing 150 people into 18°F air with nowhere warm to go is not a neutral act. It is the direct outcome of decisions made by leaders who either do not understand or do not prioritize basic cold-weather safety.

What Qualified Shelter Leadership Should Look Like

A Chief Shelter Program Officer — or anyone directing operations at this scale — should bring both education and experience appropriate to the stakes of the job.

Educational foundations

  • Social Work (BSW / MSW)
  • Public Health (MPH)
  • Nonprofit Management or Public Administration (MPA)
  • Psychology, Human Services, or related fields

A bachelor’s degree should be the floor, not the ceiling, for this kind of position. Graduate-level training is common in systems where homelessness is treated as a complex public-health and social issue, not just a bed-counting problem.

Real frontline experience

  • 10+ years working in homelessness services, shelters, outreach, or housing programs
  • 5+ years in leadership roles managing programs, staff, and crises
  • Direct experience with overnight operations, cold-weather emergencies, and high-stress environments

Without substantial frontline experience, leaders end up guessing about what people need at 8 AM on a freezing morning. Guessing is not a survival strategy.

Critical skills

  • Crisis decision-making during weather events, medical incidents, and behavioral escalations
  • Trauma-informed communication, recognizing how trauma shapes behavior and responses
  • Operational planning for morning releases, overflow capacity, and transportation links
  • Public-health awareness for hypothermia, frostbite, respiratory and cardiac risks
  • Collaboration with hospitals, outreach teams, transit, faith communities, and service providers
  • Ethical backbone to say, “This policy is harming people. We have to change it.”

Why the Current Weekend Practice Is Dangerous

Forcing people out of shelter at 8:00 AM in winter, with no dedicated indoor alternative, creates an all-day obstacle course out of basic survival:

  • People walk for hours just to stay warm, exhausting already tired bodies.
  • Those with health conditions face higher risk of hospitalization or worse.
  • People with jobs must navigate this gauntlet and still show up ready to work.
  • Mental health symptoms often worsen with cold, deprivation, and stress.
This is not just uncomfortable, it is medically risky. Hypothermia is not dramatic. It is subtle, progressive, and sometimes fatal — especially for people who are tired, undernourished, or managing chronic illness.

This Is Not Inevitable — It Is Fixable

Boulder has a choice. The city can continue to operate shelters as night-only warehouses that empty into the cold, or it can treat shelter as part of a 24-hour survival system that recognizes winter reality.

Here are five concrete steps that would immediately improve safety:

  • 1. Raise leadership standards. Require relevant education, certifications, and frontline experience for key roles.
  • 2. Mandate cold-weather protocols. Base opening hours and day access on actual temperatures, not arbitrary times.
  • 3. Create weekend warming spaces. Keep at least one indoor site open 6:00–10:00 AM on weekends during winter.
  • 4. Build lived-experience advisory councils. Incorporate the voices of unhoused residents directly into planning and review.
  • 5. Treat shelters as public health infrastructure. Align operations with medical and public-health guidance, not just budgets.

What Community Members Can Do Right Now

You don’t have to run a shelter to reduce harm. If you’re housed in Boulder and concerned about what’s happening, here are ways to help:

  • Offer rides, hot drinks, and safe information to people waiting outside.
  • Contact City Council and ask for weekend warming centers and qualified leadership.
  • Support organizations that push for policy changes, not just band-aid fixes.
  • Share this page so more people understand what is happening on winter mornings.

Lives are not abstract. They are standing outside at 8:01 AM, breath visible, trying to decide how to stay warm until the doors open again.

Boulder has the resources to do better. What is missing is the decision to put the right people in charge, with the right training, and the right priorities.