Denver, Colorado

A Case Study of Community Wealth Building (CWB)

Community Profile

Colloquially known as the “Mile High City”, Denver, Colorado is located approximately 50 miles east of the Rocky Mountains. Denver is a rapidly growing city, with over 715,000 residents as of 2020 (U.S. Census Bureau 2020). Much of this growth is attributed to an increase in in-migration, a result of the increasing availability of tech jobs and access to a more naturalist lifestyle (Alvarez 2022). Across the four years before the pandemic, for example, over 220,000 people moved to the state of Colorado, a third of whom migrated specifically to Denver County (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). 

Yet, even with one of the highest percentages of college graduates in the workforce in the country—57.1% to be exact (U.S. Census Bureau 2020)—Denver remains a city with one of the lowest high school graduation and college attainment rates. These rates are even lower for students of color (DeRuy 2016). So, what dynamics does this paradox illuminate? 

First and foremost, gentrification is a key issue in Denver, with rates equivalent to those of big, coastal cities. In fact, after the Bay Area, Denver is considered to be the second most gentrified region in the United States, with 27% of neighborhoods impacted (Richardson et al. 2020).

Second, Colorado is en route to becoming a majority minority state (Foster-Frau 2021). In Denver specifically, nearly half of residents are BIPOC. There is a strong immigrant population in the city, too, making up 12% of the city’s total number of residents (Vera Institute of Justice 2023). Many Denver-based immigrants are from Mexico and Latin America (Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs 2019), and while the Denver region has always been a landing spot for immigrants, the last year has seen large number of Latin American immigrants“bused from the southern border by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and almost all of them in need of shelter and support” (Jordan 2024). 

Finally, while the City of Denver boasts a fairly progressive mayor, Mike Johnston—known for launching the Dearfield Fund for Black Wealth, a project rooted in a reparations ethic to advance Black home ownership opportunities, while head of Gary Community Ventures—alongside a uniformly Democratic legislature, the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) has ossified a resource-constrained environment for the Denver region and Colorado state. Approved by taxpayers in the early 90s and one of the first of its kind, TABOR “limits the annual growth in state (and sometimes local) revenues or spending to the sum of the annual inflation rate and the annual percentage change in the state’s population”, thereby rendering public services underfunded and city officials perpetually strapped for cash (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2019).

Background and History

Colorado has a long, rich history of cooperative worker ownership, much of which informs its affinity for Community Wealth Building approaches today. From the work of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union (RMFU) to the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC), ensuring that the economy works in a way that expands wealth building opportunities for all has been a critical goal of the state’s residents. 

In the mid-2000s, inspired by the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, OH, the head of the RMFU took an interest in urban cooperativism as a strategy for economic growth in the Rocky Mountain West. In 2012, The Denver Foundation, the largest community foundation in the region, launched a new grantmaking area in economic opportunity and became one of the first funders of RMFU’s Urban Cooperative Center. At the same time, RMEOC was growing from an unlikely partnership between a rogue Re/MAX franchise owner who had sold his franchise to his employees and a retired Methodist minister to a full-fledged organization building a movement toward employee ownership. In many ways, this collaboration, eventually known as the CWB Network—which included two trips to Cleveland sponsored by The Denver Foundation and including local municipal officials and university anchors, as well as several dozen meetings with community organizations and local residents and two CWB conferences—really inspired leaders to think about what a larger CWB ecosystem might look like for the region. 

Another key influencer of CWB activity in the Front Range—the region from Fort Collins in the north to Colorado Springs in the south—was the presence of and cooperation among cooperatives led by Namaste Solar, one of the largest worker owned cooperatives in the country. As a solar installer in the region, they were particularly interested in leveraging the city’s nearly 300 days of sunshine per year to expand the renewable energy sector locally. 

Finally, then-Governor-now-Senator John Hickenlooper was an avid supporter of worker ownership, creating incentives and easing barriers for cooperatives to access small business support in Colorado. 

In 2017, the CWB Network hired researcher Yessica X. Holguin to determine if there was energy for CWB in Denver beyond employee ownership. After hundreds of community meetings, Holguin and the Network determined that the region was ready for a more organized CWB effort. With the support of two local foundations, the Center for Community Wealth Building (CCWB) launched in 2018. 

Overview of CWB in Denver, CO

Today, three focus areas—cooperative development and worker ownership, anchor institution strategy, and BIPOC small business development—ground CWB in Denver, loosely corroborating with TDC’s Five Pillars in the following ways: 

Fair work and inclusive and democratic enterprise: cooperative development 

With five employees, CCWB’s cooperative development team is its largest. After commissioning a report from the Center on how Denver could build a robust worker cooperative sector, the City’s Economic Development and Opportunity office contracted with CCWB to help establish new cooperatives and foster cooperative conversation in the city. 

Last year, the Center supported four newly organizing cooperatives secure seed funding to help with the operational expenses associated with launching a cooperative through The Denver Foundation’s Strengthening Neighborhoods grant.  They also provided hands-on technical assistance to more than 20 nascent cooperative businesses in the region, including three childcare cooperatives, to help them move toward business launch. Finally, they provided cooperative education via a train-the-trainer model to 16 members of directly impacted communities so they could advance cooperative development in their own neighborhoods (Aqra 2023). 

Just use of land and property: community ownership of commercial real estate 

The Center’s cooperative development team is also responsible for leading the organization’s Community Owned and Benefitting Real Estate (COBRE) program, a strategy to combat displacement caused by gentrification in the city for commercial businesses in cultural legacy corridors. As an active member of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network at the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth, CCWB recently launched the Community Owned Real Estate (CORE) Academy to train community investors in the skills and tactics (e.g. power mapping, creating an acquisition strategy, designing entity type and model, raising capital, etc.) they need to own and control real estate in their communities. 

Locally rooted finance: a coinvestment fund for residents and accredited investors 

To finance this work, CCWB is also working to create an investment fund for residents and accredited investors, potentially in partnership with the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3). 

Progressive procurement: anchor institutions and BIPOC small business development

Led by Michelle Sturm, the Center’s Anchor Strategy Director who launched the Denver Anchor Network (DAN) while a consultant to The Denver Foundation, CCWB’s work with anchor institutions includes 14 organizations, including universities, healthcare systems, cultural institutions, and local government. 

One of the Center’s signature programs under this Pillar is “Feeding Anchors”, which “prepares local BIPOC-owned catering businesses to [do]...business with anchor institutions…Caterers receive training and support, have the opportunity to earn a spot on [CCWB’s] Curated Caterer List, and join a supportive network of talented food entrepreneurs” (CCWB n.d.). Next year, CCWB is hoping to expand this model to help BIPOC-owned skilled trades businesses (e.g. landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, etc.) develop the skills and networks to contract successfully with local anchors such as the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus and the Metropolitan State University of Denver, an open access university system available to anyone who graduates from Denver Public Schools and the region’s only federally recognized Hispanic Serving Institution.

Through a related program, the Equity Exchange, CCWB partners with four faith-based congregations “to leverage congregations’ buying power…to focus their spending…by purchasing needed goods and services from local, BIPOC, immigrant, women, LGTBQ, and veteran owned businesses in their communities”.

Challenges & Opportunities

Like most of their non-profit peers in the state and around the country that were inundated with funding during and shortly after the pandemic (e.g. DEI efforts, ARPA funds), the Center is facing a more resource-constrained future that may make expanding the work of cooperative ownership more difficult. However, while slow and sometimes fragmented by turnover, anchors like universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions have extensive procurement budgets that can be tapped and rerouted to local communities through progressive procurement strategies. 

In collaboration with some of these institutions, CCWB has also piloted a place-based investing group to help several of the institutions in DAN to think about how they might invest their foundation portfolios into wealth building opportunities in the Denver region. Two of the healthcare institutions in the pilot program, for example, have made a $7 million investment to support the development of affordable housing with the Elevation Community Land Trust.

Another challenge identified by CCWB is that newly launched worker-owned businesses can take some time to become profitable enough to make a significant difference in the lives of their owners and employees. As such, staff at the Center are looking at opportunities—especially ripe amid the greatest wealth transfer in history (Hall 2019)—for employee ownership conversion of businesses who already demonstrate profitability and have established market share in their respective sectors. 

Community Stakeholders

Resources

  • “Creating a Robust Worker Cooperative Sector in Denver: Building on Local & National Best Practices”, a 2021 report with helpful recommendations to create a supportive worker cooperative ecosystem 

  • a resource on the basics of cooperative law in Colorado (and other places), designed by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)

  • ShopBIPOC and Buy Local, platforms for identifying Black-Owned, Indigenous-Owned, People ​of Color-Owned, Women-Owned, and Immigrant & Refugee -Owned businesses in Denver

  • Futureby.community, Community Field Notes created by CCWB and other partners in the National Equitable Recovery Alliance to strengthen policies and investment in community ownership and stewardship