Sharing stories that demonstrate how ARPA funding safeguarded Boulder from the impacts of the pandemic.
In the wake of COVID-19, the City of Boulder received $20.15 million in one-time funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to help our community recover from the pandemic.
In addition to federal guidelines for how ARPA dollars can be spent, the city developed its own guiding principles for the funding, which incorporate the city’s equity, sustainability and resilience goals, using the city’s Sustainability + Resilience Framework and Racial Equity Framework. Visit the city's ARPA Funding Dashboard for more details about how the city spent ARPA funding.
While the focus of this funding was on pandemic recovery, the truth is that this support helped the city play a pivotal role in safeguarding and transforming our community's well-being. These funds represented a lifeline that kept businesses afloat, artists creating, and families fed and housed during a time of global uncertainty.
The pandemic highlighted vulnerabilities in our community and underscored the role of local government in fostering economic stability and social equity. By effectively stewarding these resources, Boulder was able to mitigate immediate crises and lay the groundwork for long-term resilience. These stories are a testament to our city's ability to adapt and thrive as we work together to build an equitable community for all.
Expanding Human Services
The city used funds to help prevent community members from experiencing displacement, hunger, or lacked access to essential services due to COVID-19.
Eviction Prevention
The city’s Eviction Prevention and Rental Assistance Services (EPRAS) program expands legal and financial services for those facing a potential eviction. The program helps people resolve eviction-related housing issues through legal services, rental assistance and mediation.
Sarah had usually been able to make ends meet for her and her 6-year-old daughter but when Sarah's new partner stole money from her, it sent shockwaves through their already strained finances. To make matters worse, she began experiencing health problems, which prevented her from working as much as she needed to. As the bills piled up, Sarah found herself falling behind on rent. Before she knew it, she was facing the terrifying prospect of eviction. The stress was overwhelming, and she feared losing her home and disrupting her daughter’s life. With the help of rent assistance through the EPRAS program, Sarah was able to catch up on her rent and stabilize her situation. The relief she felt was immense.
Food Security
In the wake of the pandemic, food prices rose dramatically along with other costs of living, and more low-income community members needed help putting meals on their table. While the city allocates roughly $1.4 million annually for food security and nutrition programs through its Health Equity Fund, ARPA helped fill the gap created by post-pandemic inflation.
Pantry shelves are going empty. We need more beans and tortillas.
- Emergency Family Assistance Association (EFAA) staffWe’ve had record numbers—serving more than 200 families one day in September 2024 and giving out more than 100,000 pounds of food in August 2024 alone. The additional ARPA funding has enabled us to purchase more fresh produce to help meet this growing need. Community members with limited incomes regularly share with us that the food pantry helps their families live without the anxiety of hunger and eating healthier than ever with the fresh produce we have available.
- Chad Molter, Director of Harvest of HopeThe city distributed one-time funding to various community partners to help maintain healthy food supplies, including fruits and vegetables and culturally relevant foods, and brought more than low-income 80 households off a waitlist for food vouchers, so that they could receive healthy, fresh produce for another two years.
Financial Assistance
OAS case manager meeting with community member Angel De la Torre.
ARPA funding has been critical in providing financial assistance to older adults living with low and extremely low incomes. The city has been able to prevent potential evictions, pay for much needed medical and dental services, and help community members with utility bills. These supports allow older adults to successfully remain in our community.
Mary, 78, came to Older Adult Services (OAS) for financial support. Mary lives on less than $20,000 dollars a year; she has a housing voucher and other benefits for support and can meet her basic needs but never has money leftover at the end of the month. When Mary experienced a dental complication, she was faced with a $2,000 bill that wouldn’t covered by insurance. She had an impossible choice to make, either endanger her health by not having the procedure or lose her home by not being able to pay rent. OAS case managers worked with Mary to cover the bill with APRA funding and support from other partners and she was able to get the treatment she needed.
Building Home Peer Support
Building Home aims to provide support to newly housed community members through peer support, daytime services and a housing retention team. The program matches individuals with lived experience in homelessness with people who have recently been housed and also provides a qualified team of mental health and homelessness case management professionals who work with clients to help keep them housed.
Community is an essential part of a successful pathway to housing. Matching newly housed individuals with those who have themselves moved from homelessness into stable housing creates a network of support that is often missing during this transition.
- Molly Bowers, executive director at Focus ReentryBehavioral Health
Strengthening Boulder’s behavioral health safety net has long been a priority for the city. ARPA funding was used to help local organizations reduce administrative burdens, provide additional training, increase available services and reduce barriers to accessing life changing programming.
Support from the city is helping MHP ensure that our services are welcoming, inclusive and equitable, through trainings and staff practices; and providing professional development opportunities and other programs that can improve staff recruitment and retention. This is helping us remove barriers people may experience when reaching out for critical behavioral health services, and better serve our community.
- Jennifer Leosz, Co-CEO, Mental Health PartnersUtility Bill Assistance
City residents with water utility accounts in arrears received financial support to maintain water services. Support for utilities financial hardship is still available through community partners.
Recognizing that the COVID-19 pandemic meant a loss of income for many residential customers, the city paused the collections process that leads to service disconnection from March 2020 through November 2022 to allow customers more time catch up on their payments. In addition, Utilities was able to provide nearly $250,000 in ARPA funding to help 171 residential customers who were still recovering from the economic toll of the pandemic.
Our customers were so grateful to learn of the ARPA funding availability. One customer who was a retired teacher had lost her supplemental income of tutoring students. She relied on that income to bridge the gap between her retirement income and her ever-increasing living expenses. The ARPA funding gave her the chance to not have to choose which bill to pay.
- Vanessa Bonner, City of Boulder Billing ServicesFostering Economic Recovery
These funds addressed COVID-19 impacts on businesses and support inclusive recovery.
Outdoor Dining
The Outdoor Dining Pilot Program provides a post-pandemic model for reimagining how we utilize our public spaces while promoting a diverse and vibrant economy that supports businesses and residents alike. The city helps fund infrastructure that allows restaurants to create safe, accessible outdoor dining spaces.
300 days of sunshine per year means 300 opportunities to use our patio. Our street side patio nearly doubled the square footage of our restaurant bringing more money to our employees and more security for us during periods of cold weather and slower business. Guests love our outdoor space, and we love to be able to work outside too!
- Jake Novotny, owner of Jungle on the West EndArts Administration Rehiring Fund
Heather Gray Photography
3rd Law Dance/Theater, SINGULARITY
The Arts Administration Rehiring Fund awards helped stimulate the rehiring of arts administration positions that were laid off during the pandemic. The three-year enhancement grants were associated with the Boulder Arts Commission’s General Operating Support funding. Funds were used to hire back 10 staff members across as many arts and culture organizations, as well as offer or increase salaries to sustainable wages, increase the diversity of their leadership, allow staff to grow professionally. Two organizations rehired Executive Directors. All organizations have plans to continue to maintain the position after the funding ends. The addition or expansion of these staffing positions allowed organizations to raise more funds with other grantors and private funders, seek additional contributed income, reach broader communities, reconnect with pre-COVID partners, forge new connections and partnerships, do more in-depth data collection. Several organizations were able to translate their programs to Spanish and offer bilingual programs.
This Arts Administrative Rehiring support has been crucial for us to take the next steps in solidifying ongoing structural support in the past year. With this additional help, 3rd Law has been able to increase its programming by roughly 35% and is currently slated to increase another 10% for the 2023-24 season.
- Katie Elliot, 3rd Law Dance/TheaterCreative Neighborhoods and Experiments in Public Art
Experiments in Public Art is an ongoing program with projects across the city that are temporary and interactive. The projects funded by ARPA generate opportunities for artists to create public experiences designed to help people reconnect and build social resilience after the pandemic restrictions.
The Creative Neighborhoods mural program deployed creativity in our everyday landscape, in which artists collaborated with neighbors to create new social infrastructure assets. Events were held to paint murals, build connection and leave neighborhoods with artwork that fosters pride in community.
My participation in the Experiments in Public Art program was expansive and educational. I was able to incorporate new ways of thinking about how to get the public interested in play, and I ended up creating a piece that was much more interactive and engaging than my previous works. Sticking with my project for over a year was a new way of working for me, and the prototyping, community feedback, and personal follow through that being in the program encouraged has helped me grow as an artist.
- Paige of Peanut Butter ArtsArtist Hiring Incentives
Artist Hiring Incentive Grants respond to industry-specific, COVID-related workforce impacts through targeted grants to Boulder-based cultural organizations. These grants help organizations hire local professional artists; a workforce that is important to Boulder and experienced an outsized impact from the pandemic. This grant provides a hiring incentive for nonprofits to employ Boulder-based visual, performing and literary artists to perform or create new work.
Boulder has recently experienced mass shootings, the effects of climate change, and racial injustices. The range of emotions in the mural serves as a reminder that it’s possible to face our feelings and find balance. The mural serves as a safe space for the community and a reminder that we all feel the emotional weight of everything that has occurred in the last few years.
- Street Wise Youth Workshop with Joseph JimenezSmall Business Recovery Support
Small business recovery support during the pandemic included promoting safe visitation; providing grants for arts organizations to rehire vital staff lost to pandemic workforce cuts; supporting safe dining and restaurant industry recovery with a delivery fee subsidy and partial funding of an outdoor dining pilot program; helping fund retail industry recovery and BIPOC business support programs; and providing grants to help small businesses mitigate negative impacts of the pandemic.
One artist came to me in tears during a musical performance thanking me saying, “I forgot how much I missed live music.” Many visitors and participating artists have remarked on how safe they felt visiting our outdoor venues, seeing many people masked. Also, expressing appreciation for the opportunity to be around other people again.
- NoBo Art DistrictWith a huge reduction in sales since the pandemic, the grant money gives us a little to put to marketing efforts to try to close the gap.
- Small business grant recipientSupporting City Operations
These funds were used to support City of Boulder operations related to COVID-19 and keep essential programs and services running during a time of strained resources.
Emergency Response Connectors
Thirty Emergency Response Connectors, including stipend-based Community Connectors and volunteers, worked to share accurate and updated COVID 19 information, educate community members about basic needs resources, and surface concerns and issues raised by their neighbors. More than 3,000 masks and tests were distributed, and Connectors advised on logistics for pop-up vaccination clinics. In all, the Connectors’ networks include roughly 1,000 households in some of Boulder's most at-risk neighborhoods.
I’m using my time in a good way in my neighborhood. I got a good response from them. I think it’s one of the best ideas! By bringing connectors into each neighborhood, it allows people to notice what’s going on in the city.
- Claudia SanchezThis is a new and highly important approach because we know, the community knows, that the city offers this, and the city shares this information. And legitimately, the city is concerned about all of us too. All the information that the city offers reaches our neighborhoods, and that is thanks to Connectors. This has been a very important tool in order for this information to reach the neighbors.
- Leticia Garcia, Emergency Response Connector
Looking Forward
The COVID pandemic highlighted vulnerabilities across our community. Through ARPA funding, the City of Boulder was able to foster economic recovery, expand human services and build connections between neighbors and local government.
ARPA funding underscored the crucial role local government plays in placing resources where they are most needed. While on-time funding can be challenging to allocate, local government has a unique ability to build relationships in the community it serves, develop an understanding of where support will be most impactful and create meaningful connections.
During a time of great uncertainty, programs such as Building Home and Emergency Response Connectors provided opportunities for hope and support. Creative Neighborhoods and Outdoor Dining brought renewed vibrancy to public spaces. Initiatives including Utility Bill Assistance and financial support for older adults kept community members safe and secure. While data can help paint the picture of how the city used ARPA funds, the human stories shared here underscore the importance of our city’s ability to adapt quickly and build programs creatively.
Looking forward, the City of Boulder will continue to build toward long-term community resilience.