Nearly 25,000 people live across 559 square miles of mountain terrain. No one has mapped where the opioid need is, who is serving it, or where the gaps are. Teller Strong changes that — and we are not outsiders doing it. Teller is home.
“I will search for the lost and bring back the strays.”
Ezekiel 34:16Teller is genuinely rural and genuinely hard to reach. There is no city center, no single encampment, no one place where people gather. The need is dispersed and hidden — people in cars in the national forest, couch-surfing, doubled up, tucked out of sight in small towns where being seen struggling carries a heavy cost.
Winter and distance make it harder still. A person in crisis can be many miles from the nearest help, on roads that close.
That is also why Teller has never been mapped. Rural mapping fails when outsiders attempt it, because it depends on trust that only a local, in-person presence can earn. We live here. That is the whole difference.
We ride along with Sheriff’s deputies and sit down with fire districts, local police, and County Human Services to learn where the need actually shows up, and when.
Food pantries, libraries, resource centers, churches, and the recovery groups already working quietly in each town. Every conversation logged, every gap recorded.
A county-wide picture of where opioid harm is concentrated, who is already serving it, where the gaps are, and how the pieces connect — the first of its kind for this county.
A standing local table that keeps Teller’s agencies working together after the map is finished. The map is not the finish line — it is the foundation.
Coverage means the whole county — including the places that are hardest to get to in February.
Because we already work on the ground in El Paso County, we saw something no one had recorded: Teller residents who use opioids regularly travel down to El Paso’s west side, around Old Colorado City, to obtain them — then return up the pass.
That movement ties the two counties together in a way no map has ever shown. And it gives us a rare, practical starting point: a known route and a set of locations where otherwise-invisible Teller residents can actually be found.
Our presence at both ends lets us study that corridor from both directions at once.
Seeds of Recovery reaches the El Paso County residents no one has engaged — the unsheltered adults living outside the reach of appointment-based care.
Teller Strong reaches the Teller County residents no one has mapped — dispersed across mountain terrain, invisible to every system meant to serve them.
Between them runs the corridor. One organization, working both ends of the same road.
“Teller has waited long enough. This is how the response finally reaches it.”
Teller Strong depends on local relationships — with first responders, churches, recovery groups, and the people who know these towns. If that is you, we would like to talk.
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