GUNNISON — Priscilla Swanson carefully picked up a clay model of an elk head and touched the freshly painted antlers. “Oh, these antlers. I’m so surprised they stayed on. That was a whole ordeal,” Swanson said, carefully setting the palm-sized piece down on a table.
The elk was shaped and painted by Mark Treadway, a client of Six Points Evaluation and Training in Gunnison, and had just made its final, harrowing journey between the Six Points headquarters and the ceramics studio at the Gunnison Arts Center, a grand historic building a few blocks away where Swanson is a board member.
Most people in Gunnison know Six Points as an always-buzzing thrift store, but in a narrow room beside the shop’s tightly packed couches, microwaves, clothing racks and knick-knacks, is the organization’s core constituency: 23 adults with intellectual disabilities or traumatic brain injuries who rely on Six Points for everything from finding a job, to getting to medical appointments, to a rotating list of day programs like the monthly art making session.
On Friday, the Gunnison Arts Center will hold an opening reception for the Six Points Art Show, an annual, monthlong exhibition to showcase the work of Six Points clients. The two organizations have collaborated on the show since at least 2007, the first year that mention of a Six Points show appears on the Art Center’s website.
“It’s been going on long enough that people don’t really remember how it got started,” said Nancy Lakiotes, assistant director of Six Points. “It feels like it’s just always been there.”
Finding the funds
Six Points was started by Franny and Rob Harden in 1977 on a trip through Gunnison. The couple had been volunteering at homes for adults with disabilities and asked the Gunnison Chamber of Commerce where they could find “services,” to volunteer with.
“They said ‘we don’t have services, our community provides for themselves.’ I didn’t quite agree with that,” Rob told the Gunnison County Times in 2022.
The Hardens stayed and established Six Points with the help of local volunteers and an annual $3,700 budget supplied by the federally funded Developmental Disabilities Council in Montrose.
These days the organization offers services in five categories: community access, mentorship, residential services, day programming and transportation. The number of services an individual receives varies widely, depending on their needs. Some clients need help with basic daily tasks, like getting groceries and housekeeping. Others just need a place to hang out during the day to watch movies or work on art projects. The staff at Six Points tries to accommodate every client as much as possible, whether that’s teaching them how to mold clay into animal shapes, helping them pay their bills or driving them to medical appointments.
All of Six Points clients are on Medicaid, which means the center is reimbursed for some services they provide. But administrators recognized early on — well before the state’s current Medicaid woes began — that the reimbursements would not begin to cover their ambitious goal to “provide whatever the individual needs to be able to live independently in the community,” Lakiotes said.
For instance, transportation to and from medical appointments is something that Six Points would lose money on without supplementary funding. Mileage is reimbursed through Medicaid, Lakiotes explained, but not wages for the employee shuttling clients to and from Medicaid providers — most of them in Montrose, an hour and a half away — at an hourly rate that now includes waiting for the U.S. 50 bridge to fully open.
“But that’s not something we’re just going to stop doing,” Lakiotes said, about the transportation services.
That’s where the thrift shop comes in.
The latest breakdown of Six Points’ revenue shows about 42% of its funding comes from thrift shop sales, 38% from Medicaid billing, 15% from grants and 2% from private donations.
“My understanding is that Six Points was looking for any and all opportunities for clients to have community employment. There was a hot dog concession stand, some cleaning contracts, a greenhouse at one point,” Lakiotes said. “The thrift shop was just another opportunity for employment, and it’s just continued to grow, so now it is a very important part of our income.”
Some Six Points clients sell their artwork year-round in the thrift shop. Others focus on making a piece or two to debut at the annual art show. All of the artwork can be bid on at the show, the proceeds are divided between the Gunnison Arts Center and the artists.
“They ended up here for a reason”
The number of clients who Six Points works with at a given time doesn’t fluctuate very much. Once people settle into Gunnison, they tend to stick around, Lakiotes said.
“A lot of the people that we serve wouldn’t live here if it weren’t for our services. They probably would live in Montrose, Grand Junction or Denver. That’s not the end of the world, but it wouldn’t be their first choice,” she said. “They ended up here for a reason, so if we can provide what they need and keep them here, that’s the ideal.”
The community also keeps an eye on the well-being of Six Points clients outside the thrift store walls, Lakiotes said, adding that she wouldn’t want to do this kind of work in Denver.
“The community here is very watchful — not in a creepy way, but in a kind way,” she said. People will call Six Points if they think one of the clients is being treated poorly around town, she said. “We even get heads up about people who aren’t our clients, which is always super touching and kind of awkward.”
The Gunnison Arts Center, where the Six Points show will be displayed through October, is a community cornerstone in its own right. The building is a historic landmark, built in 1882 as an office for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Over the course of a century it has served as a hotel, hardware store, clothing shop and restaurant. In 1992 a local nonprofit, the Gunnison Council for the Arts, purchased the historic building and transformed it into the arts center. Old, worn floorboards from the original building were repurposed and now line the walls, and crates of 1880s bottles discovered under the building are sitting in the offices upstairs.
For the past seven years, the center has been renovating the interior and preserving the outside, restoring the roof, updating the gallery and theater, and installing new walls and retractable seating. The constant construction, combined with board member turnover and the loss of its community dance program, has meant harder times for the Arts Center, Swanson, the board member, said. But she is hopeful that opening reception Friday will help them turn the page.
“Things ebb and flow over the years. Now that we’ve got a new building and new blood, we’ll just start fresh,” she said. “That’s the only thing we can do.”