The Center Closes This Evening

Sent 7/17/13

The final day of operations at the Colorado Springs Together Center will be today, Thursday, July 18th.

Please remember that, although The Center is closing, Colorado Springs Together will continue its work to support the recovery and rebuilding efforts in Mountain Shadows.

The CST leadership team will maintain regular meetings; the website will remain active, providing online tools and resources; we will continue email, Facebook, and Twitter communications; and neighborhood enhancement projects will proceed as planned. Meanwhile, Mountain Shadows Community Association (MSCA) will be ramping up their communications and taking a leading role in the next phase of the recovery mission.
 
Our phone lines will be forwarded to the Colorado Springs Office of Emergency Management. The direct line to the Office of Emergency Management is: 719-385-5957. You will be able to continue reaching us by email at CST@ColoradoSpringsTogether.org.

The Journey

Closing our doors is a bittersweet experience, bringing to an end the first chapter in the recovery of Mountain Shadows. However, as rebuilding has continued to increase in pace, traffic coming through The Center has continued to decline. The recovery of the Mountain Shadows neighborhood is now robust, and The Center’s mission as the physical hub of the recovery is fulfilled.

The Center originally served as a one-stop-shop for a wide range of resources including the Small Business Administration, Small Business Development Center, AspenPointe, Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado, Colorado Springs Utilities, Parkside HOA, Housing and Building Association of Colorado Springs, the CST Discount Card Program, volunteer insurance advisors, Long Term Recovery Group and many other organizations and consultants. Over the last six months, as the recovery moved into full swing and the focus shifted to community enhancement activities, The Center transitioned into a gathering place for a wide range of neighborhood organizations and event planning efforts.

An entire community truly came together in the old Blockbuster facility that transformed overnight into the Colorado Springs Together Center. Neighbors were discovered, new friendships were established, and a neighborhood achieved a remarkable start to its recovery. The results speak for themselves. Right now, 91 homes are rebuilt and an additional 119 homes are in various stages of construction, putting us over the 60 percent mark. What a feat and a tribute to the tenacity and commitment of the residents of Mountain Shadows!

We want to express an enormous amount of gratitude to our financial donors and sponsors for providing countless provisions and services for The Center over the last year. Those who supported The Center with in-kind and monetary donations included Ent Federal Credit Union, OfficeScapes, CenturyLink, Comcast, Bircham's Office Products, The Sound Shop, La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, Goodwill, Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado, Coca-Cola and many others along the way. Their support was critical in providing this successful resource center to the Mountain Shadows residents.

We also want to thank our extensive band of volunteers from across Colorado Springs and the Mountain Shadows neighborhood, as well as our office manager, Annie, for staffing The Center and serving hundreds of families in their time of need. These wonderful volunteers helped organize events, HOA meetings, community gatherings, events for kids, vendor fairs, welcome home basket deliveries and everything in between.

Last, but by no means least, we are grateful, beyond words of expression, for the thousands of volunteer hours the CST leadership team put in over the last year, covering all aspects of the Waldo Canyon Fire recovery effort. From feverishly launching Colorado Springs Together to providing unbiased insurance advice; from quickly creating the website to attending countless team meetings; from rebuilding and restoring the natural environment to establishing the wildly successful discount card program; they worked tirelessly.

We hope that 6840 Centennial Boulevard will no longer be remembered as "the old Blockbuster," but forever as “the old Colorado Springs Together Center," a beacon to the community of Colorado Springs and the neighborhood of Mountain Shadows.