In Chaffee County, a local nonprofit helping prevent domestic violence has laid off three employees and won’t have the staff to help every client who needs a protection order or a hotel room.
In Lake County, the budget cuts mean the local victims services organization can no longer replace cellphones or other belongings that people leave behind in the rush to get out of unsafe homes. People fleeing abuse might get just one night in a hotel room, not the multiple nights the nonprofit used to cover so that victims of domestic violence had more time to make a plan. Airfare to go stay with family in another state is no longer within the budget.
Across Colorado, organizations that work to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault are struggling to keep shelters open or afford hotel rooms for people who need safe places to sleep as federal funding has shrunk in the past few years. The groups have shifted to helping only the people who are at the edge of crisis, about to become homeless, as they have cut services like counseling and rental assistance that would help people stay out of dangerous living situations permanently.
“This is absolutely a crisis for victims services and we need more people to pay attention to that,” said Kristen King, co-executive director of Advocates of Lake County, in Leadville. “We can only help the people who are right there and we cannot help the people who are headed there, which is not optimal.”
The dwindling resources hit harder knowing the Leadville community had two domestic violence-related deaths in the span of eight months. In April 2025, a 35-year-old woman was shot to death by a 25-year-old man at a home in Mountain Valley Estates, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office. And in August 2024, a 32-year-old man shot a 33-year-old woman just before midnight in a home on Ninth Street in the heart of historic Leadville, the sheriff’s office said.
The funding cuts to Advocates of Lake County, The Alliance in Salida and other domestic violence prevention organizations across Colorado and the country are mainly due to a decrease in federal dollars from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Federal crime victim fund decreased by 75%
Violence Free Colorado, a coalition with about 45 members across the state that are domestic violence and sexual assault service providers, said organizations are struggling to staff their shelters and have cut food support and counseling in the past few years.
Colorado, unlike some other states, has no line item in the state budget to contribute to those services, so the federal cuts feel even worse.
“It has been catastrophic,” said David Karnes, Violence Free Colorado’s director of public policy.
For many programs, funds from the Justice Department’s Victims of Crime Act made up half or three-quarters of their budgets. More than 200 victim services agencies in Colorado rely on that funding. And that source has been drying up. The combined loss in 2025 was $4.8 million, according to Violence Free Colorado.
The federal Crime Victims Fund, created in 1984, collects fines and penalties from federal prosecutions to provide support to crime victims. But since 2018, funding for Colorado from that source has decreased 75%, mainly because of changes in federal prosecution strategies, including decreased prosecution of financial crimes. A fix passed by Congress in 2021 helped a bit, but not nearly enough for the fund to recover.
And the drop has been compounded by recent federal funding freezes and delays in grant disbursement.
Meanwhile, domestic violence fatalities are going up in Colorado. The 2025 report from the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board found that 72 people died in domestic violence homicides in 2024, including victims and perpetrators. This was a 24% increase from the prior year, even as overall homicides in Colorado declined by 16.75%, the report said.
The deaths included eight “collateral victims,” all children, ranging in age from 3 months to 7 years.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are seeing those rates rise as we see funding jeopardized,” Karnes said.
In 2024, victim services coalitions in Colorado worked to pass Proposition KK, which levied a tax on gun sales that was intended to backfill some of the lost federal funding. But it generated far less revenue than expected, about $19 million per year instead of $39 million, leaving victim service agencies “at a breaking point,” according to Violence Free Colorado.
Funding opportunities down $649k for Lake County services
Some state-funded grants to fund homelessness have disappeared, too. That included a Colorado Department of Local Affairs grant that was discontinued. It had funded the bulk of the staff for the Advocates of Lake County homelessness program that the Leadville nonprofit runs for people whether or not they have experienced domestic violence.
Advocates of Lake County trimmed this year’s budget by about $300,000 and enacted a spending freeze.
In all, the dwindling federal and state grants have meant at least $649,000 in lost opportunities for funding, King said.
The organization, which has existed in Lake County for 44 years, closed its shelter on the outskirts of Leadville and listed it for sale last year. The safe house hasn’t sold, so the nonprofit is giving up its lease for its office space and moving that into the former shelter. People who need shelter are sent to scattered locations, including hotels nearby and in other towns down Interstate 70, and in a short-term rental home that Advocates uses. This works better anyway because Leadville is a small enough town that the safe house never felt confidential, King said.
But the cuts have meant that people seeking shelter might only get one night in a hotel, hardly long enough to set up a plan to leave a dangerous home, she said. The spending freeze has meant that the nonprofit is not filling open positions, so its staff shrunk from 12 to nine, and there is no money to replace cellphones or other “nonessential” help.
And when every organization in the region is going through the same budget cuts, they can’t rely on each other the way they did in the past, King said.
“When we see other organizations, like The Alliance who are also in the same situation that we are, we have fewer and fewer places to refer folks because all of us are in the same boat,” she said.
“The federal government is not coming to save us”
In Chaffee County, the portion of The Alliance’s budget that came from the federal Victims of Crime grant dropped to $212,000 from more than $500,000 just in the last few years. The Alliance, which pays for hotel rooms for domestic violence victims and then offers counseling the next morning, laid off three of its six employees this month.
“These federal funding sources have just tanked,” said Shelley Schreiner, a strategic consultant for The Alliance who is also on the Salida City Council.
The situation has motivated her to call for a shift in thinking about how the local economy and its people can support local resources.
“The federal government is not coming to save us,” she said. “We can’t live our lives at the political whim of people in D.C. We really need to get back to that idea that we build our own community.”
The organization, which helped about 600 people last year, provides assistance getting protection orders, signing up for food or rental aid, and gathering birth certificates and other important documents that people left behind trying to get out of bad situations. The Alliance’s counseling program offers six free sessions. And the organization has a forensic nursing office where people can get medical care, and evidence collection, after they are physically or sexually assaulted.
The cuts mean some people don’t get those exams in Salida or at all, unless they ride in the back of a police car to Pueblo or Frisco.
“It means there is nobody there to help you get a protection order. Or get you a place to stay. Or get you gift cards for gas to drive to Tennessee where their family lives,” Schreiner said.
It also means prevention programs are cut, services that would help people before they are assaulted and have to flee.
“If that has to go, we’re losing ground,” she said.
Type of Story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
