When the founding owner of Club Q and his newly-appointed advisory and development team set out to design a permanent on-site memorial to the victims and survivors of the massacre last year in Colorado Springs, they found themselves on a well-worn but largely unmarked path through a uniquely American landscape.

Only a fraction of the mass shootings in the U.S. have been or are slated to be memorialized in tributes that remain, on-site, after the impromptu installations wilt and fade.

“There’s no manual for this. There’s no training for this. There’s no guidebook,” said Club Q survivor Michael Anderson, now the vice president of operations for the team set up by club founder and owner Matthew Haynes in the wake of the shooting that killed five people and injured 17 on Nov. 19.

A controversial multi-million-dollar memorial honoring victims, families and survivors of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where a gunman killed 49 and injured dozens more June 12, 2016, remains in planning and funding limbo.

“We can look at Pulse, but what happens next?” said 25-year-old Anderson, who was tending bar at Club Q the night of the shooting, “There aren’t many examples of queer spaces that have gone through this for us to be, like, ‘OK, we’ll just use that model.’ We’ve had to create our own model, from scratch, every day.”

Anderson’s not only talking about a building redesign, but healing, as a club “family,” and a greater community.

“I felt this storm cloud above Colorado Springs immediately following (the shooting),” said Anderson. “I think everyone was, like … how is Colorado Springs going to react? It’s quite a conservative city…(with) a history of, over the last few decades, not being so welcoming and not being so friendly” to the gay community.”

While the approved ballot measure later was overturned and never became law, the city still struggles with a clingy legacy from the 1990s when it led a charge to amend the state constitution to prevent protected status based on homosexuality or bisexuality.

The groundwork for a “phoenix-like” rebirth for Club Q will begin with a whole cloth remodel, and new “presence” in the Springs, prior to a grand reopening in the fall, Anderson said.

Documents recently submitted to the city planning department show the proposed site changes, along with a rendering of a new exterior for the club, tucked amid other businesses down a spur of street off North Academy Boulevard.

Club Q’s remodel plans include many new features and a tribute; rendering revealed

The proposed new exterior includes elements that flout the old sneaky vibe, with a “public-facing” tribute area and boulder garden with “the tallest flagpole we could do,” and a light “shooting straight up,” said Haynes.

“We’re hopeful that that flag can be seen by anyone driving down Academy Boulevard, to help everyone remember what happened,” said Haynes.

The flag pole will be surrounded by five standing stones, representing the five lives lost — Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derek Rump, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Green Vance — and boulders representing those who were injured.

Haynes said that the families of those killed in the shooting, as well as the survivors, were consulted at every stage of the process.

“We’ve taken hundreds of hours with family members, with victims, with designers to come up with a tribute and design and we feel that it’s very important that the meaning is understood. Not just, ‘Oh, here it is,’” Haynes said.

Tara Bush was a deejay who’d spun tunes for 8 years at the club, before she was shot three times while attempting to escape the violence that Saturday night.

She’s now the executive administrator for the team Haynes set up to map out the club’s way forward, including the future of a $300,000 public tribute garden it hopes can be funded, in large part, through donations and the sale of branded Club Q merchandise, available at clubqonline.com.

Bush said she hopes the memorial garden can provide for others the kind of closure she felt after finally returning, last month, to the club she had long called “home,” but whose story is now forever changed.

The experience was “surreal,” but also necessary, she said.

“I wouldn’t say it was a complete closure for me, but it was a start of a closure,” Bush said. “I think once this tribute’s built and we cut the ribbon, we take a shot at the bar and have a full circle moment, I think that’s when it will be a closure.”

She hopes she’s not the only one.