Serving the community since 1926
WEEK OF DECEMBER 21, 2023
VOLUME 97 | ISSUE 3
$2
How a nonprofit is leaning into Daddy Bruce’s example
Number of Venezuelans arriving in Denver is about 30,000 BY JENNIFER BROWN AND JESÚS SÁNCHEZ MELEÁN THE COLORADO SUN AND EL COMERCIO DE COLORADO
The Epworth Foundation is an allvolunteer run nonprofit that focuses on four core areas: youth, family, hunger prevention and health. Its programs run the gamut from health screenings and a twice-a-week food bank to fatherhood/motherhood counseling and a children’s day camp. But perhaps it is best known for its Denver Feed-A-Family in Honor of Daddy Bruce annual event, which provides thousands of families with a full Thanksgiving meal.
Lenny Maris Gonzalez wanted to come to the United States for her children’s sake, she explained as her youngest, 2-year-old Yaxi, scrambled to climb onto her lap beside their tent on a Denver sidewalk. On a chilly December day, the Venezuelan mother described how, after her husband died from COVID, she traveled the rest of the way to the United States from Colombia with her five children and her brother. Now they cook their meals on a tiny grill on the street, wearing donated snow boots and warming up in a tent outside the Quality Inn near the corner of Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street. “He left me with five children and I decided to migrate for a good future, for my children, for their studies,” Gonzalez said in Spanish as she sat in a plush green recliner outside the door of her tent. Around her, the street in the northwest Denver neighborhood of Highland is unrecognizable, a result of a city overwhelmed by its efforts to help the nearly 30,000 Venezuelan migrants who’ve arrived in Denver in the past year. The tent encampment, which has stretched farther and farther up the street in recent weeks, is outside one of five hotels that the Denver Department of Human Services is using to house 2,700 migrants.
SEE NONPROFIT, P6
SEE ARRIVING, P8
Bruce Randolph, aka Daddy Bruce, was a community philanthropist whose humanitarianism lives on through The Epworth FoundaCOURTESY OF THE DADDY BRUCE RANDOLPH LEGACY FOUNDATION tion, as well as having a local school and street named in his honor.
The Epworth Foundation supports community year-round BY CHRISTY STEADMAN CSTEADMAN@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
After Princess Dandoo-Young’s team at Spelman College won the Goldman Sachs Market Madness Competition, she was moved that The Epworth Foundation reached out to pass along a congratulations. “It was unexpected because I didn’t think people in Colorado were still following what I was doing,” Dandoo-Young said. “It made
me feel like I’m still part of the Epworth family.” Dandoo-Young was born and raised in Aurora and is currently studying economics with a double minor in mathematics and management and organization at the college, which is a historically Black, women’s liberal arts university in Atlanta, Georgia. Her heart lies in entrepreneurship and, earlier this year, Dandoo-Young started her second business, which aims to help minority young adults bridge the generational wealth gap. Dandoo-Young attributes a lot of her success to The Epworth Foundation, which has offered her not one, but three scholarships. “It’s the investment they’ve put in me,” she said. “They looked at me
VOICES: 12 | LIFE: 14 | CALENDAR: 17
and saw my dreams, aspirations and faith.” Carrying on Daddy Bruce’s legacy
DENVERHERALD.NET • A PUBLICATION OF COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA
DEGREES OF ART The high temperature beauty of blown glass
P14