Mike Coffman is 71 years old and governs Aurora, Colorado. Since February, every Friday afternoon he leaves his mayoral office and heads to the Aurora Regional Navigation campus, a 600-bed shelter. There, among residents who have nowhere else to sleep, he lies down on a cot in the men’s communal dormitory. On Saturday morning he helps serve breakfast.
He himself helped found that shelter and sits on the board of the organization that runs it. He says he needed to verify, with his own body, whether the public money allocated to combat homelessness really translates into results. “It has helped me see them with compassion, as individuals, and not through a lens of condescension or contempt”, he wrote on Facebook.
It is not the first time Coffman has put himself in the shoes of those without a roof over their heads: in 2021 he spent a week undercover as a homeless veteran, although he later sparked controversy by calling extreme poverty “a lifestyle choice”. This time the reactions are also divided: there are those who applaud him for leading by example, and those who remind him that he, unlike the others, returns home every Saturday.
