Liz Vasko from Rock for the People and Erin from the Safe House Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence joined DJ Carebear on KGNU to discuss the Love and Resistance Dance Party happening in Lafayette. The event features an all-female local lineup—Resisting Bitch Face, Ironically Pink, and Lisa Sells—and aims to celebrate community, resilience, and solidarity through music. Erin also shared the history and services of her organization, which supports survivors of domestic violence through shelter, legal advocacy, counseling, and prevention programs.
DJ Carebear: So we’re just gonna jump into the interview then. Awesome. Okay, so we are in the studio with Liz from Rock for the People and Erin from the Safe House Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence.
Can you both hear me and lean forward? Yes? Let’s see if we can hear you.
Erin: Thanks for having us.
DJ Carebear: All right. We’re gonna talk about this event that’s coming up, plus your organization. You all have this event, Love and Resistance Dance Party, on Friday. What was the inspiration for this?
Liz Vasko: Yeah, so actually one of the musicians, Soos, had the idea to put this together to really get people all in one space—to bring some community around all the stuff everyone’s been going through lately with politics and people’s civil rights. She had this vision of bringing together something that could celebrate music and all of us.
People have been resisting and protesting, and you gotta come together and also celebrate, kind of repair from all of that. Historically, a lot of that’s been done through music—getting together and celebrating being together, even through hard times.
So we wanted to put together a lineup that celebrated all local bands. It’s an all-female lineup, which is pretty cool. We’re also partnering with Erin, which is really great. We wanted to make sure there was part of the event that included a local organization so we could support local people. And we’re excited to have Erin with us.
DJ Carebear: So you are part of Rock for the People?
Liz Vasko: Yes.
DJ Carebear: Can you tell the listeners what that is? I’m sure there are a lot of people who haven’t heard of it.
Liz Vasko: Yeah. Rock for the People is a local nonprofit in Lafayette, Colorado. We serve the music community in East Boulder County.
We support musicians of all genres, all ages, all instruments—with a specific focus on helping equity and diversity in the local music scene. We got started because we saw that the local music scene didn’t seem to be representing the local community the way it could be, and we wanted to help change that.
DJ Carebear: KGNU does the same thing. We really try to walk around town and see what the demographic is, and ask why those people aren’t being represented on air, in the news, in community events, or at festivals. You know, we just had the Festival del Sol up at Chautauqua yesterday, which is all local Latin music. It’s in its fifth year, and slowly people are starting to focus on representing the diversity that’s actually here.
Liz Vasko: Definitely.
DJ Carebear: And how is Erin from the Safe House Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence involved with this event?
Erin: Well, we are just incredibly grateful to be a beneficiary. One of our longtime community partners is playing in the show, and so we’re just incredibly excited to be invited into this community space.
DJ Carebear: And tell us about your organization for people who don’t know.
Erin: Sure. We opened in 1979 with our first confidential shelter for people fleeing violence. At the time, it was connected to the Women’s Resource Center in Boulder. Within about a year, we became the nonprofit Boulder County Safe House—really innovative from the very beginning, right?
We had a shelter with 12 beds, a staff of maybe three people, and the first children’s program in a shelter. It was an incredible resource for the community.
Our programs have evolved over time to meet the needs of survivors. For example, we were just talking about affordable housing. One of the most significant barriers to getting out of a violent situation is having a safe, affordable place to live. There are a lot of barriers to accessing safe, affordable housing, so we developed transitional housing. We had the first transitional housing program in the state, in partnership with Boulder Housing Partners—a partnership that continues to this day.
In the early 2000s, we went through some serious rebranding. Broomfield became its own county, and we needed to be more than Boulder County Safe House. We serve all of Boulder County and Broomfield.
Since the beginning, we’ve known that to address domestic violence, we need to address violence and oppression in all its forms. For example, if you’re a survivor of domestic violence and you’re also surviving xenophobia or racism, it’s going to be harder to get out of a violent situation, to be believed, and to access community resources.
So we became the Safe House Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence and made a commitment to integrating anti-racism and anti-oppression into all of our nonviolence work.
I just want to add one more little history piece: the address of our confidential shelter used to be published in the phone book—for those of us who remember using phone books! That breach of confidentiality and safety led us to construct a new facility, a bigger shelter.
Today, we have a confidential shelter in Boulder with 27 beds. This past year, we sheltered 350 people who spent 9,000 nights with us. We have a 24/7 crisis and information hotline—last year, we answered about 9,000 calls.
We still have the transitional housing program, which supported 427 people last year. We now provide legal advocacy for people who need help getting restraining orders or navigating legal systems. Last year we supported 424 people through legal advocacy.
We also provide mental health support and counseling for people of all ages—627 adults and 257 children accessed counseling last year.
As you can see, much of this work responds to violence once it’s happened, but for the last 20 years, we’ve also been committed to prevention. We have an incredible, evidence-based violence prevention curriculum that we use with middle and high school students. Last year, we taught it to 4,800 students here in BVSD.
We’ve grown a lot in the last 45 years. All programs at Erin are free and accessible in Spanish and English. We have our confidential shelter and offices in Boulder, Broomfield, and Lafayette. That’s us.
DJ Carebear: That’s incredible.
Erin: A lot of history there, yeah. A lot of people know we’re a shelter, but it’s so important for folks to know there’s so much more to it.
DJ Carebear: Yeah, I didn’t realize that. How are you supported financially? Where do the dollars come from to support all of these programs?
Erin: It’s a mix—local, state, and federal grants, in addition to private foundations and donors who help keep the doors open.
DJ Carebear: Has any of that changed recently in 2025?
Erin: We’re feeling the impact of the cuts. One of the things we’re most concerned about is the financial strain felt in the community, especially among our most vulnerable members. That strain increases the prevalence of violence in the home, and we’re expecting a greater need for support, advocacy, and community-based resources.
DJ Carebear: How do people find you online?
Erin: You can visit us at safehousealliance.org or reach us 24/7 through our crisis line at 303-444-2424.
DJ Carebear: Fantastic. So we’re going to just hit on this event a little bit more before we go back into some music. It’s the Love and Resistance Dance Party this Friday at The End in Lafayette. It starts at 7:00 PM.
The bands performing are Resisting Bitch Face, Ironically Pink, and Lisa Sells. Tickets for this event are at theendlafayette.com.
Anything else we need to know about this event for Friday?
Liz Vasko: I want to highlight the bands. We have three performing, as you mentioned, and it’s really exciting to have an all-female lineup—it just doesn’t happen often!
First up, Resisting Bitch Face—Soos, the visionary behind this event, is part of that band. They’re a little punk, a little loud, a little raw—so much fun if you want to feel all the feelings you’ve been having lately.
Then we’ve got Ironically Pink, another hard-rock, high-energy, dancey band. And Lisa Sells—she’s a singer-songwriter with a strong message, politically and socially conscious.
I think it’s going to be a blast. If you come out, you’re going to really enjoy it, and we’d love to have you. This is about celebrating all of us being in the same room—dancing, listening to music.
DJ Carebear: Fantastic. So again, that’s theendlafayette.com for tickets.
Thank you, Liz and Erin, for being here today and educating us and inviting us to this event.
Liz Vasko: Thank you so much.
DJ Carebear: And we are going to hear from The Linda Lindas with Rebel Girl. Keep it right here on The Afternoon Sound Alternative on KGNU.
