$5,434 raised by 25 donors
22% complete
$25,000 Goal
In humility, Community Outreach Service Center (COSC) has served the community since 1988 as an agent of the change addressing African American male incarceration, HIV/Aids, education, housing, homelessness, mental health, substance misuse, and food security.
Our geographic area has predominately been the Five Points/Curtis Park community however, the area has expanded beyond these two communities due to displacement and income inequity. Now, we have expanded our reach throughout Northeast Denver and the Greater Denver Metropolitan area. .
Community Outreach Service Center (COSC) listens to learn from the voices, experiences, and perspectives of the communities we serve to plan, design, and implement programming.
The COSC Peer Network model is a long-term relationship with a peer who has been there, not a hand off to a stranger with no lived experience. When one seeks to help another but has no understanding of where that person came from, where their family values are grounded, they follow a system that instructs them to shake it off and pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
The COSC peer to peer connector team has lived experience with mental health, substance abuse, and incarceration. Peer to peer connectors need lived experience to be able to understand where people have come from and to be a living testimony of what one can be.
The mission of Community Outreach Service Center (COSC) is to meet the basic needs of the homeless and poor residents of the Denver metropolitan area while increasing their ability to become and remain self-sufficient.
The overarching outcome is to reduce the rate of recidivism among African American male ex-offenders in northeast Denver, moving the client from dependency to healthy self-sufficiency.
Community Outreach Service Center is people working together for a better community.
Community Outreach Service Center is people working together for a better community.
In 1988, COSC was established as a recognized 501©3 Nonprofit to serve the Agape Christian Church community as it stood at a flash point of violence, destruction and devastation in 1988.
One of the overarching outcomes is to reduce the rate of recidivism among African American male ex-offenders in Northeast Denver, moving the client from dependency to healthy self-sufficiency.
Now in a new century and new decade, COSC remains as an anchor in the Five Points community quietly serving the needs of all residents.
The COSC Peer Support Network nurtures a community where clients work together to build a better community.
COSC Peer-to-Peer Navigators develop relationships with clients to meet basic needs but with a long-term focus to build trust to continue to serve them after the emergency needs are met.
Our Peer-to-Peer Navigators develop plans to guide people to stabilize housing, re-enter the workforce in a multi-tier approach that create a pathway to self-sufficient independent housing and a career pathway
with wage gains in the workforce.
Our clients are not data we track, but family for life. COSC approaches everyone with the philosophy that
"You are family, you just don't know it yet."
Organization name
Community Outreach Service Center
1988
Tax id (EIN)
74-2523777
Category
Human Services, Mental Health & Crisis Intervention, Employment, Housing & Shelter, Community Improvement & Capacity Building, Religion-Related, Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
2515 CALIFORNIA STDenver, CO, US
CO, US