Elevated Denver
Elevating a just, equitable and high-functioning social safety net that promotes the enduring well-being and dignity of all Denver community members.
Collaboration is essential to tackling today’s public health challenges — because no single organization or sector can do it alone. This is why relationship building and partnerships are at the heart of our work to support healthier communities. In this ongoing series, we spotlight the individuals, organizations, and collaboratives that make up Trailhead’s network of partners, sharing their impact in their own words.
Who do you or your organization serve?
Elevated Denver serves the entirety of our community as we are developing a stronger social safety net for all neighbors in need of support. When that is in place, everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Which communities or regions do you support?
Elevated Denver focuses on homelessness in Denver but our model can be applied to a variety of social sector challenges not only in Denver but throughout Colorado and the United States.
What’s important about this work for your community?
Foundational to our work is to shift power to people with lived experience of being unhoused to design new solutions that are highly responsive to community needs. When we started this work, we didn’t find many spaces where those with lived experience were engaged, and no spaces where they were given a seat of leadership at a collective table to drive solutions to issues like homelessness. We wanted to change that, and our model is a new way of approaching large-scale social issues that breaks them into manageable pieces to drive solutions and seed broader change.
Photo Credit: Collin Llyod, Unsplash
How can people support your work or get involved?
A monetary investment in our work is always incredibly meaningful and important to keep the work going.
We also invite people to listen to the Elevated Denver podcast.
Every part of our work is collaborative, and we are always looking for more perspectives and voices to engage in our Collaboratories where solutions are designed to address breakdowns in our homelessness system.
Finally, we have a highly-engaged group of Champions who care about the work and provide valuable feedback on the Collaboratory process and solutions. We invite people to reach out if they might be interested in joining that group.
Through fiscal sponsorship, how have you been able to increase your impact? Or how has your work changed or evolved without having to deal with administrative burdens?
We are a small staff and have appreciated that fiscal sponsorship has allowed us to focus on building out the work with minimal administrative responsibilities.