Colorado Village Collaborative Head Taking New Job With State

Cole Chandler, executive director of the Colorado Village Collaborative, which has been one of the most innovative homelessness resolution organizations in Denver over the past few years, will step down from that role in August to take a new job working for the State of Colorado.

"I am a Denver guy, for sure, so that will be a growth step for me. But I'm interested in continuing to move further upstream. I think one of the things that myself and everyone else in the field have acknowledged is this isn’t just a Denver issue," says the 34-year-old Chandler.

After working with the Colorado Village Collaborative for over five years, Chandler will move to a newly created position as director of homelessness initiatives at the Colorado Department of Human Services.

"While I'm exceptionally proud and grateful that CVC has gotten to a scale of five sites and 200 people served a night, we have the opportunity to serve thousands of people within the state agency," says Chandler, who moved to Denver in 2014 and began working and advocating with Denver Homeless Out Loud.

Back in March 2017, a handful of people experiencing homelessness and advocates started a crowdfunding campaign that led to the creation of the CVC. The organization, with Chandler as its head, initially focused on constructing homes for Denver's first tiny home village, Beloved Community Village.

The CVC stayed small in its first few years; in 2020, when it got a city contract worth $120,000 to create and maintain tiny homes, it had just three people on staff.

That year, however, the CVC, along with other nonprofit organizations across Denver, began to push the administration of Mayor Michael Hancock to greenlight safe-camping sites, where people experiencing homelessness could stay in uniform tents, at a facility equipped with toilets and sinks, and access services on site.

After some initial reluctance, Hancock came around in July 2020. The first safe-camping sites, one of which was run by the Colorado Village Collaborative in Uptown, went live in December of that year.

Today, the CVC has a $5.2 million operating budget and over thirty staffers. The organization runs two tiny-home villages and three safe-camping sites. It will receive $4.2 million from the City of Denver in 2022.

And as the city continues to grapple with the grim realities of over a thousand people living on the streets on any given night, the Hancock administration has fully embraced the safe-camping site model, which the mayor even cited in his State of the City address on July 18.

"There’s no way on earth that that’s just the work of one person. That’s such an amazing collective effort. And really from the beginning, that’s what CVC has been about," Chandler says. "It’s just been great, and I've been carried and buoyed by relationships all along the way in this role, and I feel extremely grateful for that."

CVC's board of directors has appointed Shay-La Romney, who joined the organization as chief operating officer in February, to take over as the CVC's interim CEO while the board searches for a new executive director.

"Please do not think for a moment that CVC will take a pause. This adept, accomplished organization will not skip a beat in its critical work that has led to more than 55,000 nights of safe, dignified shelter in partnership with people coming from homelessness," Terrell Curtis, CVC board chair, wrote in an email announcing Chandler's departure.

Chandler will start his new job at a time when the Colorado Legislature just earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for homelessness resolution and services, thanks to a windfall of pandemic relief money from the federal government. "I think one of my first tasks, too, will be helping to build out a plan and then from there really piloting some ideas and choosing some projects that we can work on, and investing in those and seeing results, and then going back to the end of the legislative cycle for more resources to do it at scale," Chandler says.

According to Chandler, one reason the job was created was so that the Department of Human Services has a "point person" who can guide the department's policy on homelessness and also work across agencies at the state level.

"I want to make a large impact, and I believe that we don’t have to live in a city or a state or a country where we have mass homelessness," Chandler says.

Chandler stepping down from the CVC is the second major move at an important homelessness resolution organization in as many months. In June, John Parvensky, the longtime president and CEO of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, announced plans to retire later this year. Parvensky took over as the head of that organization shortly after it started in 1985 with a budget of just $100,000. Today the CCH has a budget of $100 million. The CCH is currently searching for a new leader, too.

While he wasn't approached about that job, Chandler says it wouldn't have been his first choice at this stage of his life.

"One of the things that I'm excited about is that I’ll get to be an individual contributor again. My first task won’t be to build out a team," he says, adding that he'll have more time to focus on his two young kids and wife. "It brings a little bit of freedom."