For those who’ve never talked with Rudy Gonzales, a few tips before you do. Gonzales, CEO and President of the Denver-based Servicios de la Raza, does not have a pause button. Neither does he have any control over his ever-percolating salesmanship and undiluted optimism. Both bubble over. Finally, when he sets an appointment for the chat, count on it not happening at the scheduled time. But when it does, the aforementioned qualities will kick in and you’ll forget all about his tardiness.
Servicios, as is known by everyone from top-of-the-food chain Colorado politicians to people simply trying to restart their lives, has been serving Denver since 1972. Over the last several years it has also opened satellite offices outside Denver, including El Paso County and Pueblo.
Starting as a seedling designed to serve the underserved and forgotten and growing into what it has become, said Gonzales, Servicios has found a niche, one that today is nearly indispensable for thousands of men, women and younger clients. In times past, this was a group who had nowhere to turn.
Today, Servicios’ clients can be anyone from homeless men and women to young families or seniors and young people. Many are those who reside among the often neglected or forgotten, including people recently released from incarceration.
Gonzales, is the fifth of eight born to a family of Chicano activists—his parents were Rodolfo ‘Corky’ and Geraldine—has been along for the entire ride, watching Servicios efforts both wax and wane. He remembers times when the organization was “just months (away) from putting locks on the doors.”
But through imagination, innovation and a lot of determination, it has survived and in a fashion that not even eternal optimists like Gonzales could have envisioned. It has grown from a niche healthcare stop to first option for many.
Its darkest days, both fiscal and emotional, were bleak, but not hopeless. “The first step,” in its resurgence and recovery, he said, “was to put in a lot of very hard work to rescue the organization.”
The next step was “reconnecting the organization to the community as a service and advocacy organization.” Somewhere along the line, Gonzales acknowledges, “we had lost that.”
But in just the last two years, Servicios has benefitted from a $2 million-dollar federal grant that will go toward completing a West Denver community center. In March, it was also named a recipient of a $2 million-dollar grant from billionaire Mackenzie Scott. Scott, former wife of billionaire Jeff Bezos, has announced a plan to donate $640 million to more than 360 small non-profits across the country.
The mission of Servicios is not new but dramatically improved, refocused on the needs of serving one client at a time. A list that continues to grow. “We began with seven staff,” he said, “and just a handful of programs.” Today Servicios, Gonzales said, has 110 full time employees who provide a menu of services that includes mental health services, employment and financial coaching, health services including HIV and STI exams, reentry coaching, victim counseling and youth leadership mentoring.
Servicios’ healthcare does not include providing prescription drugs. “We’re a community clinic,” he said. When a person requires medications, Gonzales said, they are referred. “We do the warm handoff,” sending them to an authorized facility that can write prescriptions.
A visit to any one of Servicios locations can be eye opening. On any given day, you might see its parking lots dotted with the Governor’s or Mayor’s vehicle to ‘vintage’ models whose once shiny exterior is a long ago memory and whose odometer is dizzy from too many revolutions. Inside, patients can hue to any shade of a color spectrum. “Our services meet a community’s needs,” said Gonzales.
Servicios is one of the many organizations that met the challenge of the pandemic that shaded the world just a few years ago and continues to wash, albeit far less ominously, over certain segments of the population. But beyond honoring its basic mission, Servicios also served as a location for COVID immunizations benefitting thousands at a time of greatest need.
Scanning Denver’s horizon, Servicios is unique in many of its offerings by providing options neither available nor even considered by other similar organizations. With a clientele as diverse as any in the state, Servicios meets its mission.
For example, Servicios holds a monthly sweat lodge, Gonzales said. A sweat lodge is a traditional Native American ritual for purification, spiritual renewal and connection to Mother Earth.
Servicios also provides the services of curanderas, a traditional native healer most often found in countries like Mexico and other Latin American nations who specialize in non-traditional medicines.
Being “culturally responsible,” Gonzales states, “allows us to be much more inclusive.” He calls Servicios “the largest one-stop place like this in the entire state…we can’t do it all, but we can do it all if we have the resources. That’s the key.”
Even Gonzales admits that the original idea of Servicios, which sprang from an often-misunderstood Crusade for Justice, one of the nation’s first social justice centers advocating for Latinos in the tumultuous 1970’s and shepherded by his late father, Corky, amazes him.
“It was the birth child of the Chicano movement,” he said. “What the Crusade taught was self-determination… forging our own destiny. Teaching we could sit behind the desk, not just cleaning it.”
By his count, Gonzales said Servicios will serve an estimated 100,000 men, women and families in various locations this year, most along the Front Range from Denver to Pueblo. It will do so thoughtfully, he said, making sure to chart its path carefully and responsibly. “We’re very careful,” Gonzales emphasizes. “We have a five-year business plan to make sure we’re not spreading ourselves too thin.” Servicios will grow, he said, but only “by being deliberate and strategic.”
