DASHR’s Transforming
Safety Wheel
All of DASHR’s work is inspired by our Transforming Safety Wheel which paints a vision for intervening in community needs where otherwise policing, jails, and courts have been a primary resource. All of our programs and work fits on the wheel, and in many cases, multiple places.
Community Empowerment: Resources, infrastructure, relationships in community. Education, employment.
Basic Human Needs: Housing security, food security, access to healthcare.
Crisis Response: Mental health first aid, medical response, de-escalation. Alternatives to police.
Healing and Restoration: Restorative practices, transformative justice, mental health support. Long-term behavioral health resources.
MUTUAL AID / COMMUNITY OUTREACH
DASHR works with partners and community to engage and support Denver’s unhoused neighbors through outreach and mutual aid. We work to support with survival gear, first aid, general service connection, relationship-building, and food and water. In a broad concept DASHR has named Street Health, working with our unhoused community and ensuring support, dignity, and humanity for all undergirds all of DASHR’s work.
Street Health Sunday
Each Sunday, DASHR meets to engage and support our unhoused community and educate businesses and residences about using alternatives to police such as the STAR program. Typically, this entails volunteers who hand out water and food, medics who offer low-level first aid support, and canvassers who distribute flyers.
BUILDING COMMUNITY RESPONDER PROGRAMS
DASHR is a national leader in creating community responder programs as alternatives to police. This was the initial goal in creating DASHR, inspired by the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon. Since our founding in 2018, DASHR has been successful in helping to create STAR in Denver, the Aurora Mobile Response Team (AMRT), and has expanded to supporting over a dozen communities in Colorado in creating similar programs and has advised dozens of others across the country.
Support Team Assisted Response (STAR)
DASHR’s work started with the vision, design, and creation of the Support Team Assisted Response Program (STAR), which sends clinicians and medics to low-level 911 calls instead of police. Launched in June 2020, STAR is now expanding. DASHR’s role has shifted over the years, but we continue to serve in an advisory/oversight capacity as well as a service provider to the program.
STAR Community Advisory Committee (SCAC)
After STAR’s launch in 2020, DASHR became a community facilitator of the program to lead discussions and planning for the its expansion. One outcome of our facilitation was the development of the STAR Community Advisory Committee (SCAC) to hold STAR accountable to its original vision and values and to relay input and concerns from the community. DASHR is still represented on the SCAC and works to expand community input in the program.
Aurora Mobile Response Team (AMRT)
In January 2020, DASHR began working with members of Aurora City Council and the city manager to propose and design a community responder program similar to STAR. In September 2020, the program was unanimously approved for funding and officially launched in September 2021. Like STAR, AMRT sends out a paramedic and clinician to low-level 911 calls.
RESTORATION AND HEALING
DASHR believes in restorative practices and transformative justice as a way to center healing from crisis, conflict, and trauma. Initially advocating for programs, DASHR is expanding to provide our own restorative services.
Restorative Denver
Launched in 2019, Restorative Denver allows the Denver District Attorney’s Office to divert cases from a prosecution process to restorative process in the community. If the DA, defense attorney, victim’s advocate, and judge all agree, certain cases may be offered a restorative process, which then goes to The Conflict Center. If the restorative process is complete and harm repaired, charges may be dismissed or dropped entirely. DASHR helped design and launch this program and remains on its advisory committee.
Healing Hub
DASHR provides restorative practices through our community-based Healing Hub which is still being developed and refined. Community will have the ability to seek restoration and mediation by working with DASHR and our services. The Healing Hub will also support the STAR program through offering restorative and mediation for parties involved in 911 calls, members of the public interacting with STAR, and internal partners to the STAR program.
OTHER PROJECTS
