Bringing Hope To Short Creek: Southwest Recovery Mission's Labor of Love

Colorado City, Arizona

In the 1930s, an isolated piece of real estate came into the possession of the Priesthood Group, a loosely organized body of renegade hold-outs of polygamy, recently cut off from the LDS Church.  It seemed perfect, isolated, remote, only accessible (then) by dirt road, nestled against the Vermillion Cliffs on the Arizona Strip, hugging the Utah-Arizona border, originally called Short Creek.  It seemed the perfect place to practice their religion, which included plural marriage and a variation of a Mormon communal system of United Order that they later branded the United Effort Plan (UEP).

There were built-in issues from the beginning.  I spoke to a man who lived there in the early days, in the 1940s, and he told me, tongue-in-cheek, that the only "freedom" he had while living there was to decide whether or not to get his wife pregnant.  (That even changed with Warren Jeff's prison edict that no man could have sexual relations with his wife without his express permission.)  This same man told me of a story - he went with the other men to fell lumber on the Kaibab, and, while he was gone, the "Priesthood" came into his house, and, while his helpless wife looked on, they emptied his pantry of all food to redistribute to other members, leaving him only two jars of peaches.

Since those days, the community has grown, being incorporated into two cities - Colorado City on the Arizona side, and Hildale in Utah.  And over the years, so has the abuse of ecclesiastical leadership increased - arranged and forced marriages, underage unions, and a plethora of other abuses,  I have a theory about this - if a community and its lifestyle becomes, in and of itself, illegal and is forced into isolation, it becomes a fertile breeding ground for tyranny and oppression for the people under a despotic leader.  This is what happened to the FLDS community under megalomaniac Warren Jeffs, who maintains his control from prison.

In recent months, there have been arrests and warrants issued for many of the leaders involved in a Food Stamp (SNAP) fraud case.  As a former Arizona welfare caseworker myself, I was aware of welfare and benefit fraud as a prevalent problem in this community.  In essence, what the leadership was doing was collecting EBT cards from the people in the community and using it to redistribute food to other people.  But the way this worked was that the elite were eating lobster for dinner, and those maligned were lucky if they got anything.  So basically, the "Priesthood" was controlling all the food as a way to control the people.  If your behavior was acceptable, you were awarded food.  If it was not, you were denied food and literally starved, along with your wives and your children.  I can think of nothing more insidious than the deliberate starving of children!

Luckily, there have been people and organizations that have worked against the odds.  From the Safety Net initiative, an interstate government cooperative organization whose primary focus in the FLDS in this region to some people organizing a music festival, many have felt called or driven to help the less fortunate in the Short Creek area.

Southwest Recovery Mission Ministries is one such organization.  They are a non-profit whose mission is to bring food to the deprived children and families of Colorado City and Hildale.  They accept food donations from various donors and churches in primarily Utah and Nevada and make sure that these donations get to families in need among the FLDS, those who have fallen victim to the evil machinations of the leadership.  They make sure that these families have enough food to provide their children.  With the donations they receive, they are also provide clothing for those in need.  The leadership has also made sure that utilities are so expensive that they provide a burden on the people, and Southwest Recover Mission makes sure that people do not have their water and electricity because they cannot pay exorbitant bills.

I recently spoke to Alan Curtis, one of the organizers and volunteers at Southwest Recovery Mission.  He talks about driving into Colorado City for the first time and remembers having seen it in a dream.  It was almost as if he was called to help these people.  Soon, he met Phil Jessop, a local who had been cut off from the FLDS twenty years earlier and had been working to bring about positive change for years.  Al tells me the early days were adventurous, complete with threats from the Goon Squad, or local enforcers.  Many of the families that accepted help were often punished by the leadership.  But the ministry has brought positive influence, and the work that they are doing is mostly accepted by the community.

Al is refreshingly self-effacing about his role in the mission and stated that he did not want to draw attention to the organizers but to the mission itself, and he gives credit for their success to the women of the former FLDS who used their networks to spread the word and encouraged many families who were suffering to come forward and receive help.  He says that many of the families who have been on the receiving end of assistance, once they get on their feet, turn around and help other families.

The main opposition that the ministry faces is getting funding.  Often, they resort to paying for food shipments out of their own pockets.  Whereas many local churches have donated funds and food, Al says that the greatest challenge is getting other Christian churches to want to help a people with such social stigma as polygamy placed on them.

I would strongly encourage you to donate to this cause.  You can make a donation on their website or on their Facebook page.

For those among the FLDS, emergency food boxes are provided usually on Thursdays at"

2012 Bubbling Well Lane

Apple Valley, Utah 84737

Contact:  Donna McGinnis

(224) 217-2405

This is a good organization, and they are bringing hope and sustenance to a people who have long needed it.  Please consider donating.  It's a worthy cause, whether you are for polygamy, or against it.