The proposition
Second Watch Veteran Housing leases ordinary three- and four-bedroom houses on ordinary streets, places one or two veterans per bedroom according to individual need, and walks with each of them for up to eighteen months until they exit to permanent housing — never to the street.
Two houses and eleven beds open in the first year. Thirty percent of budgeted services are reserved for women veterans who have survived abuse, and the first house we open is theirs.
Mark F. Gremillion is a civilian. The military expertise this work requires is held by the veterans who govern this organization — the board is veteran-majority by bylaw — and by the veterans who will staff its houses. We say this plainly on every document we produce, because a funder who forms the wrong impression and later discovers otherwise is right to stop reading.
The gap
On a single January night in 2026, the Pikes Peak Continuum of Care counted 131 homeless veterans in El Paso County. Forty-five had no shelter of any kind. Thirty met the definition of chronic homelessness.
A year earlier the figure was 195. Counted veteran homelessness in this county fell 33 percent in twelve months, and chronic veteran homelessness fell 55 percent. We state that before a funder finds it, because it is the strongest thing we can say: veteran homelessness falls where transitional and supportive capacity exists.
This county lost its only dedicated veteran instance of that capacity. The Crawford House — a 20-bed veteran transitional facility operated for twenty-two years by the Colorado Veterans Resource Coalition — closed permanently with thirteen beds still in service. The largest dedicated veteran transitional program remaining in the region serves ten veterans at a time.
131
veterans homeless on one January night, 2026 — 45 with no shelter at all
195
additional shelter or transitional beds the county is short (2026; it was 518 in 2025)
10
beds in the region's largest dedicated veteran transitional program — its cap
15.6%
of El Paso County adults are veterans — 85,526, nearly triple the national rate
Pikes Peak CoC 2025 and 2026 PIT/HIC Key Takeaways and PIT Summaries; U.S. Census ACS 2019–2023. Where press coverage of these counts differs from the CoC's own release, the release governs.
The Continuum of Care states its gap as additional year-round emergency shelter or transitional housing beds needed — 518 for January 2025, 195 for January 2026. The gap narrowed because the count fell. That category, emergency shelter and transitional housing, is precisely what this organization adds and precisely what the county lost.
The 2026 count night fell below zero degrees Fahrenheit, which drives people into shelter and suppresses unsheltered counts. Both years should be read as floors rather than precise censuses.
The model
We do not build a building. We lease houses that already exist, in neighborhoods where people already live, and we pay above market to be the most attractive tenant on the street. It is the fastest route to a bed and the least institutional place to put a person who has been institutionalized enough.
Every bedroom in the women's house is single occupancy. Every resident holds their own key. For a survivor, one room that no one can enter is not a comfort — it is the condition of being able to sleep.
An eleven-month average stay against an eighteen-month ceiling. Housing search begins in phase two and intensifies in phase three. Nobody is discharged to the street — that obligation is written into the operating manual, not implied.
Active substance use, untreated psychiatric conditions, evictions, no rental history, any discharge characterization including Other Than Honorable. The population every other provider screens out is the one this exists for.
Awake overnight staffing in every women's house from the day it opens — never the house that waits. Men's houses run an on-call standard in year one and convert as revenue allows. We state which is which rather than implying they are the same.
Among 448,290 service members who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and separated between 2001 and 2011, those discharged for misconduct were 5.6 percent of separations but 25.6 percent of the veterans homeless at first VA contact — nearly five times the risk (Gundlapalli et al., JAMA, 2015). Yet veterans with Other Than Honorable discharges were only 4 percent of those served by VA's own Grant and Per Diem transitional housing nationally in 2018–2020 (Military Medicine, 2024). The veterans at highest risk are the least reached. That gap is the niche.
The thirty percent
Thirty percent of budgeted services are dedicated to women veterans who have survived abuse of any kind, including military sexual trauma. It is a floor, it is continuous rather than an end-of-year average, and it is written into the bylaws so that a future board cannot quietly let it lapse.
Veterans overall are not over-represented among this county's homeless — 9 percent of those counted in 2026 against 15.6 percent of the adult population. Women veterans are a different matter. A woman who served is three to four times more likely to become homeless than a woman who never did, and a history of military sexual assault multiplies her adjusted odds of homelessness by 4.4. Its prevalence among homeless women veterans is 53 percent, against 27 percent among their housed peers (Washington et al., Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 2010).
The order in which the houses open is not an administrative detail. House 1 is the women's house, four bedrooms and four beds, every room single occupancy. It opens first. Between its opening and the second house, the program is one hundred percent women's beds.
The mandate has an origin. The founder's mother served as a corporal in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve in the Second World War. House 1 will carry her name — recorded by board resolution, and never on the building, because the address of a survivors' house is not published anywhere, ever.
Who runs it
The board is veteran-majority by bylaw — no fewer than fifty percent plus one — seated at nine to eleven members within twelve months, including at least two women veterans, one with lived experience of this population. That is where the military expertise sits, and it is a governance provision rather than an intention.
The founder came out of the building trades — a Retired Journeyman A of Sheet Metal Workers' Local 73, greater Chicago. That is the top classification in the local: the full scope of the trade, the building-trades work rather than the narrower box-shop, factory or sign classifications beneath it. It is a standing within the trade rather than a certificate — no issuing body, no expiry, and it does not lapse on retirement the way a certification does.
It starts before the union. In the 1970s his father ran a business in Roselle, Illinois called House Mechanics, which did exactly what the name says — go into a house, write down everything wrong with it, then fix all of it. It also built seven homes from the ground up for a development firm, his father superintending, he and a friend doing as much of the work as the schedule allowed. He didn't pour the foundations; he did float and finish the basement floors. He worked all of it through his teen years.
Then he was homeless at seventeen, through northern Illinois winters. The order matters: the trade education came first, and the homeless year interrupted it rather than preceding anything.
Read that against what this organization needs at the leasing gate — somebody who can walk a candidate house, produce a written findings sheet and price the remedy. That is not a competence transferred from high-rise construction by analogy. It is the family business he was raised inside, done on other people's homes decades before this existed.
Then the trade. He was organized into the local on residential work — mechanical only: furnace, air conditioning, ductwork and ventilation — moved quickly to light commercial, and from there into high-rise, industrial and institutional construction, rising to General Superintendent with direct authority over a workforce exceeding 350 tradespeople. The arc is worth more here than the peak: this organization leases and operates houses, and the person walking a candidate property has done residential work with his own hands rather than reasoning about it by analogy from commercial jobs.
He finished his career as a Union Sheet Metal Worker out of Local 73 in Chicago — not in an office. That is how he describes himself, and it is the right order to put it in.
Years certifying hospitals and public buildings to ventilation code — air testing and balancing, indoor air quality, fire smoke damper and smoke control verification. Asked what mattered most across twenty-five years, he did not name a building or a title. He named protecting public health.
He did this work before he was a General Superintendent, alongside being one, and chose to finish in it rather than in an office. In his own words: "by the end, I liked just being responsible for myself, not running work or leading big jobs, just me, my instrumentation/tools and my pen."
The pen is the report. One man, his instruments, and his signature certifying that a building is safe for the people inside it. A hospital ward and a four-bedroom house holding seven adults are the same problem at different scale — more people than the design assumed, breathing air a system has to be verified to deliver.
Journeyman A scope covers HVAC duct fabrication and installation, building decking, architectural sheet metal, flashings, gutters and siding. Those are exactly where older residential stock fails — which is what gets negotiated at lease signing and paid for at turnover.
The trade's jurisdiction runs to fifteen-ton HVAC capacity. A residential system is roughly one and a half to five tons, so every house this organization leases sits well inside it. The person writing the ventilation specification installed those systems for a living.
A business agent dispatched him and a senior member of the local on short call — commercial and industrial, across many types of work within the Journeyman A scope. Short call is breadth, and it is also standing: a business agent chooses who gets sent, and who gets paired with a senior man.
He came up in a trade where every worker is personally accountable for whether the man beside him goes home at the end of the shift — at height, where a lapse is not a citation but a funeral. That is the origin of the staff safety program, and why its rules are absolute rather than advisory.
No OSHA certification, and this organization claims none. The TABB and NEMI certifications behind the hospital ventilation work lapsed at his retirement and nothing here relies on them. What he holds is upwards of a hundred hours of employer-provided safety training on sites where compliance was a condition of working, and two hundred hours of trade training through Local 73 — documented, as the trades document training, by certificates of completion rather than certifications. Commissioning and life-safety verification are contracted to a currently certified technician, named in the scope of work, whose credential is verified before the engagement is booked. Most owners never check. This one will.
50%+1
veteran floor on the board, by bylaw
9–11
directors seated within twelve months
6.5
paid staff at the end of year one
1:12
case manager caseload ceiling
The money
Year one costs $438,500, of which $47,100 is expected in kind — so the cash to be raised is $391,400. Roughly $118,700 of the year is one-time startup: deposits, furnishing two houses from empty, equipment, incorporation and initial insurance.
| Category | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personnel | $214,800 | $564,100 | $799,600 |
| Occupancy | $95,800 | $185,200 | $251,400 |
| Direct participant services | $42,600 | $97,900 | $168,600 |
| Administration | $70,500 | $92,000 | $131,000 |
| Development & marketing | $14,800 | $34,000 | $50,000 |
| Total | $438,500 | $973,200 | $1,400,600 |
$292
cost per bed-night, year one, at ramp occupancy
$163
steady-state cost per bed-night at five houses
15
veterans housed in year one, 61 by year three
0%
federal revenue in year one — we are not yet eligible
Year one assumes zero federal dollars. VA Grant and Per Diem — the anchor of the long-term budget — requires an IRS determination letter we do not yet hold. Private and local funding is the only thing that opens the first beds, and opening them is what makes us competitive for the federal funding that sustains them.
Year one cost per bed-night is the least attractive number in the package, and it is real. Ninety-two percent of the first year is fixed cost carried by a partial year of occupancy. It falls to roughly $163 at steady state. We publish the ramp figure rather than the flattering one.
What a gift buys
Every tier below is priced at the Year 1 cost of $292 a bed-night — the ramp figure, not the steady-state one.
The first twelve months
Articles filed, bylaws adopted, Form 1023 prepared. Three directors to start, five by month three.
Written agreements with at least three partners and a screened waiting list — the occupancy plan depends on this and is gated on it.
Program manager, case manager, women's program advocate and executive assistant onboard and trained before a resident arrives.
Address unpublished from day one. Awake overnight staffing from the first night.
Program reaches eleven veteran beds. Conditional on state and city awards landing on schedule; if either slips, this moves to month ten and we say so.
Determination unlocks VA Grant and Per Diem eligibility for the next cycle. First outcome report published to funders and board.
Where it goes
The launch years set ratios that expansion never dilutes: case managers at one to twelve, residential aides at one and a half full-time equivalents per house staffed awake overnight, women's program staff at roughly one per two and a half women's houses.
| Year | Houses | Veteran beds | Women's share | Veterans served |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | 2 | 11 | 36% | 15 |
| Year 3 | 5 | 26 | 46% | 61 |
| Year 5 | 9 | 48 | 42% | ≈103 |
| Year 10 | 19 | 103 | 39% | ≈240 |
The Year 5 and Year 10 rows are pre-rebuild planning figures. They were computed before a staffing correction that raised residential aide requirements at scale, and the staffing cost in them is known to be low — by roughly ten full-time equivalents at Year 10. They are shown for direction, not as settled numbers, and are being rebuilt. Year 1 and Year 3 are current as printed.
At year ten the organization supplies roughly a fifth of the county's shelter gap as the Continuum of Care measured it in 2025, and has housed approximately 1,200 veterans over the decade. That denominator moves every year with the count, so any share we quote carries the year it is drawn from. Growth pauses at written gates when the numbers say pause.
The network
El Paso County's veteran-services landscape is dense but housing-thin. Mt. Carmel, the VA, the Vet Center and Home Front Military Network run strong intake, counseling, benefits and employment pipelines — and none of them beds down homeless veterans in dedicated transitional housing at scale. Mt. Carmel's own transitional initiative tops out at ten veterans at a time. Homeward Pikes Peak runs permanent supportive housing, which is a different tier of the same pathway.
That gap is the niche. The proposed relationship with our anchor partner is one sentence long: they refer, screen and wrap around; we house.
The region's highest-volume veteran touchpoint. Primary referral source and wraparound hub: behavioral health, financial coaching, homeless outreach, legal access, employment.
The regional front door for HUD-funded homelessness resources, and how chronically homeless veterans are prioritized across providers. Our bed inventory must be listed and live before Month 6.
Primary and behavioral healthcare for residents. The Vet Center provides no-cost, non-medical counseling including military sexual trauma care — the trauma-informed spine of the women's program.
Emergency shelter, victim advocacy, legal advocacy and trauma counseling across three counties. A veteran-specific cross-referral agreement is the single document that most directly serves the thirty percent floor.
Free accredited help filing VA disability, pension and PACT Act claims. Every resident is connected here at intake — earned income is what makes a move-on to permanent housing survivable.
VA-funded supportive services for veteran families, covering any discharge status short of dishonorable. A referral channel now and a plausible collaboration once we have a service record.
None of these agreements is signed yet, and we will not describe them as though they were. They are named targets with a defined relationship, and written referral agreements with at least three partners are gated before House 1 opens in Month 6 — the occupancy plan depends on it. Any funder is welcome to call any organization on this list and ask what stage we are actually at.
Governance
No director has been seated yet. Rather than list aspirations, here are the seats, what each one is for, and which are still open — so anyone reading this can see exactly what the organization is recruiting for and, if they are the right person, put themselves forward.
| Seat | What it carries | Target | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Veteran directors — majority | No fewer than fifty percent plus one of the full board. The military expertise of this organization sits here | 5–6 | Open |
| Women veteran directors | At least two, one with lived experience of the population the thirty percent floor serves | 2 | Open |
| Licensed behavioral health professional | Assesses clinical qualifications the rest of the board cannot. Seated by Month 3 | 1 | Open |
| Attorney | Lease review, employment questions, the conflict-of-interest procedure. Seated by Months 4–5 | 1 | Open |
| Finance / audit | Chairs the Finance & Audit Committee, reviews the Form 990 before filing | 1 | Open |
| Founder & Executive Director | Mark F. Gremillion. Leaves the voting board when he becomes a paid employee in Month 10 | 1 | Seated |
Bios go here as directors are seated — name, service branch and era where the director chooses to state it, professional background, and the committee they chair. Nothing is published about any director without their written consent, and no name appears on any material before they have agreed to it.
The founder steps off the voting board at paid service. That is written into the bylaws rather than promised, and it is the provision a funder should check first when a founder-led organization asks for money.
The ask
We are asking for year-one operating support, for introductions to funders who move before a determination letter arrives, and for landlords willing to lease four-bedroom houses to a nonprofit tenant with a signed lease guarantee.
A 356-page package sits behind every figure on this page — strategic plan, operating manual, staff safety program, grant narratives, bylaws provisions and an open-items register that lists what is still unresolved. We will send all of it to anyone considering a gift. We would rather be read closely than believed quickly.