The holidays will not be the same for staff at COMEA, the Cheyenne nonprofit that specializes in serving the city’s homeless population.
Executive Director Robin Bocanegra said COMEA has been providing families staying at the four-family shelter, known as the Journey Center, with a special holiday experience that includes gifts for the kids since it opened in December 2019.
“That was our favorite time for families. We’d go over and make sure we had two or three Christmas trees through the building,” she said. “We would ask the families to make wish lists because we had people calling and saying, ‘Hey we want to adopt a family for Christmas.’”
This year, a series of unfortunate events at the facility, located at at 1421 Lincoln Way, has resulted in COMEA closing down the Journey Center.
In September, a six-member family trashed their bedroom and kicked in a bathroom door.
The center’s tight maintenance budget was also hit with the need to replace three toilets in a three-month period. A ceramic sink and countertop also needs to be replaced at a cost of about $1,300.
In August, a hailstorm damaged the roof as well.
Bocanegra said COMEA decided this past fall to not accept any more families until it could get money to fix the facility.
Officials, however, changed their mind when desperate families called needing assistance, so COMEA took them in despite the center needing major repairs.
That good deed ending up resulting in more trouble.
“My staff called and said, ‘Yeah we noticed these families were up at 2 in the morning and security went over to find out what was going on and they were drinking,'” Bocanegra said.
Drinking and using drugs is a hard “no” at the shelter.
“One of them left in the middle of the night, the other one was told they could wait until morning, and they moved out and left all the bottles, left rotting food in the refrigerator, left dirty dishes in the sink,” she said.
‘Not Appropriate For Use’
COMEA this week put out word that the facility will not be available over the holidays due to the actions of those families that have made the property “not appropriate for use.”
Some of the problems caused by the families in September included people breaking rules and eating in their room, creating messes. A parent allowing an underaged child to drink alcohol.
Fights. Kicking or tearing doors off hinges. Soiled and ruined mattress, as well as the built-in bed frame, which required being ripped out and replaced.
Bocanegra said staff have told her the rooms need to be cleaned, walls scrubbed and repainted, doors and sheet rock replaced and repaired, and furniture repaired as well.
“It’s just so disheartening, because not all the families are like this,” she said.
Bocanegra said COMEA opened the Journey Center for Families after a private donor gave them the down payment to purchase the building, which had been a country kitchen and medical clinic.
The Fixers
The center was initially renovated by The Fixers, a group of volunteers featured on a television series that rebuild and repair buildings for good causes.
It took them about seven days to transform the building into a place that could house four homeless families.
The Journey Center features a common living room, kitchen, three full bathrooms with showers, toilets, and sinks, two quiet rooms and four private bedrooms.
The bedrooms have built in bunkbeds and storage space.
“The whole plan was that we are going to teach them to be a healthy family. You sit at the table when you eat, you wash the dishes when you are done,” Bocanegra said. “You put your trash in the trash can.”
Families are given benchmarks to achieve. The parents need to find employment. Children must go to school and younger children must attend day care.
Bocanegra said there have been several success stories.
A single father and two teen girls excelled with the opportunity to move off the street and into the center. The father got a job, and the children were enrolled in schools.
A single mom stayed for a year, found a steady job and is now in her own home.
“We had wonderful families that came and did very well,” she said.
This past year brought a change in how COMEA accepted clients. Because COMEA required a background check, which can take up to a week, families were sharing that they were living in vehicles and children were involved.
COMEA started allowing families into the Journey Center before their background checks were completed.
Background Checks
The two families who arrived in September that caused several issues for the organization — including the need for police intervention in one case — has made the center rethink its policy.
It now requires full and complete background checks before accepting clients.
“We want to do this in a way and operate in a way that is productive and helpful for families,” she said. “All it does is take one or two that take advantage and make it really difficult for ones that just want that opportunity.”
Bocanegra said she did not want the actions of a few to impact others and emphasized that the majority of those they serve are “not terrible families.” She said the Journey Center just needs some significant repairs.
“It’s just kind of caught up to us now,” she said.
Good News
Boceangra said the good news is that while the facility won’t be open for the holidays, it will be open again at some point in 2026.
“We got a phone call today from a construction company that has offered to take on our project,” she said. “I’m meeting with him next week and he wants to fix everything. On Tuesday, he and I are going to go to the building together.”
The contractor has also spoken with a construction supply store about donating some materials, she said.
Bocanegra believes there will be a “happy ending” for the Journey Center for Families, but diminished opportunities in the holiday season for staff who always looked forward ministering to the kids at the facility.
“It was a really happy time. We had staff that would say, ‘Hey, I’m going to sneak over there after Christmas Eve and after the kids go to bed put presents under the tree so they would think Santa came,” she said. “We would go to a lot of trouble to make sure these families had a really special Christmas do they didn’t feel like they were homeless or they didn’t get to have what other kids had.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
