People to Watch 2024: Dede de Percin, CEO of Colorado Village Collaborative

Even though safe outdoor spaces and tiny home villages existed before Mike Johnston was elected mayor of Denver, the concept of micro-communities is pretty new for the city.

The idea is pretty new even for Dede de Percin, the new CEO of Colorado Village Collaborative. The nonprofit that de Percin heads is the state's most experienced homelessness service provider when it comes to running micro-communities, but when she took the job, it was her first gig dealing with getting people off the streets.

"When I took this role, obviously we knew we were going to have a new mayor, but it was in March. We had no idea who the new mayor was going to be or any direction anything was going to go," de Percin recalls. "And as it has emerged, we are the organization that has the most experience."

Colorado Village Collaborative was founded in 2017 by Cole Chandler, who is now Johnston's senior adviser of homelessness resolution and is helping the city roll out its micro-community plan. He resigned from the organization in July 2022 to work with the state on homelessness issues, then moved on to his city post.

From the start, CVC has focused on tiny home villages — communities of shed-like units — as well as safe outdoor spaces, which provide tents protected with fencing and 24/7 security. While CVC's villages generally focus on serving smaller communities, the SOS sites serve larger populations. Micro-communities are a cross between the two, she says.

"We think of the micro-communities as sort of a mashup between the tiny home villages and the safe outdoor spaces," de Percin says. "The structures look more like the tiny home villages, and the operations look more like the safe outdoor spaces."

Johnston had planned for ten micro-communities to house many of the 1,000 people he promised to get indoors in 2023, but the city is now down to one that will open before the end of the year.

Early in 2024, CVC will open the largest micro-community planned so far, a site at 2301 South Santa Fe Drive that could one day hold up to 120 units. Overland neighborhood residents have kicked up a lot of dust in response to the plans, but de Percin is sure that those residents will come around.

"We've learned a lot about this, particularly because we've had to move our sites so many times — every six months for a while until new regulations were put in," she says. "So we've learned a lot about how we work with community. Our experience has been that once we're in a community for a while, a lot of the concerns abate."

De Percin expects that CVC will "coach other organizations around what makes our site successful to other folks that are going to be launching micro-communities," she says. Two other service providers are on tap to run micro-communities for the city: the Gathering Place and Bayaud Enterprises. The Gathering Place already has $10,000 set aside in its contract to hire CVC as a consultant to help at a micro-community in the Golden Triangle.

Before she was with CVC, De Percin led nonprofits that fought anti-LGBTQ violence and pushed for access to health care. She needs a job "that centers on people," she says, and likes to work "with people who are maybe farthest from privilege and opportunity: LGBTQ folks, Medicaid folks, people with low incomes. These have been the spaces I've been in, and it's where my heart is drawn to."

Her only outlier job involved protecting the Colorado River, but she took it because of her love of whitewater rafting and stand-up paddle boarding — both activities symbolic of the difficult tasks she and Johnston will face in 2024.

"The thing about navigating rough waters is that you're not in charge. You have to work with the water or the water will always win," she says. "There are definitely going to be bumps in our job, and some of our expertise will help smooth that out. There are bumps every day in this work, so it's something we're used to as an organization."

Other People to Watch in 2024:

JR Payne, Head Coach of CU Women's Basketball
Thoa and An Nguyen, Chefs Doing It Their Way
Andrea Gibson, Colorado's New Poet Laureate
Mario Nocifera and Robert Champion, Nightlife Kings