Non-profits in Denver have redefined the city’s understanding of chronic homelessness. Now their Collaboratory model is empowering people with lived experiences to design systemic change.
Change-making can be a funny business. A lot of the time, we’re presented with a problem and the challenge is to find a viable and sustainable solution. Homelessness is different. For decades, initiatives like shelters, training programmes, and affordable housing have been adopted to support the people affected which, in many cases, no doubt relieve the hardship, at least temporarily. And yet the issue persists.
A partnership between two non-profits in Denver, USA, has discovered that this may not be because of the solutions we’re attempting, but in a misunderstanding of the initial problem.
With a new co-design model called Collaboratory, people with lived experiences are shedding light on the myriad causes of chronic homelessness. And, for the first time in Denver, they are involved in formulating solutions.
Should it prove effective, this process could signal a new approach to dealing with all manner of systemic challenges that still have us scratching our heads.
Understanding Homelessness
Johnna Flood is founder and CEO of Elevated Denver, an organisation which addresses homelessness at a systemic level together with people who have lived experiences – so called “lived experts”. She tells us that homelessness, by definition, is to be without stable housing, in all its visible and hidden ways. “That could be sleeping on the street, it could be sleeping in the shelter, it could be staying with friends and family, couch surfing, sleeping in your car.”
Elevated Denver implemented the Collaboratory model in partnership with a skilled facilitator and Omni Institute, a social science consultancy with a mission to accelerate positive social change via research, evaluation, and capacity building.
They teamed up in response to a surge in homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic strain left some Denverites struggling to pay their rent. “It was very evident that that was becoming a critical crisis,” Johnna recalls.
That increase has since slowed but continues: more than 4,100 Denver women, men, and children were houseless in 2020; by 2025, this had risen to 10,774. It’s a forever shifting picture: between 2022 and 2024, the number of families sleeping on Denver’s streets actually decreased, but those who were houseless went up by 150%.
A Better Understanding of Homelessness
Local media reports put the 2020 jump in homelessness down to the cost-of-living crisis and stagnant wages, but Johnna says that this didn’t seem to tell the whole story: “We really wanted to dig a little deeper.”
Elevated Denver created a Community Landscape, a picture of local knowledge based on interviews with local policymakers, service providers, advocates for the unhoused community, and people who were at the time or had previously been houseless.
This revealed that homelessness has all kinds of triggers. There is a lot of dehumanising stigma and assumptions are rife that individuals in this predicament are affected by a mental health condition or issues relating to substance abuse. The reality is much more diverse and complex.
Causes of homelessness can include life events such as the end of a relationship or a death in the family, the withdrawal of essential services like healthcare, domestic abuse, a change in personal finances such as unemployment, arriving in the city or leaving care or prison without the arrangement of secure shelter, and more. Where housing is precarious to begin with, such challenges may strain that fragility beyond breaking point.
Barriers Made Clear
Accounts from the Community Landscape painted a totally new picture, identifying a handful of major barriers preventing houseless people from exiting that scenario:
- No entity existed in Denver at the systemic level to deal with what kept pushing more people into chronic homelessness.
- For those people and agencies committed to forming meaningful collaborations, there was a lack of infrastructure to do so.
- Voices from lived experts were excluded from discussions that assess how effective support mechanisms are and they had never been involved in formulating solutions.
- On occasions that unsheltered people were directed to the most relevant resources, these were rarely geared up to provide urgent crisis response, distances made access difficult, or people would learn upon arrival that there was a waiting list or that they didn’t meet the eligibility criteria.
Forming the Collaboratory Model
With the pain points framed and clear, Elevated Denver applied their new Collaboratory model to ideate solutions.
The Collaboratory is a series of facilitated workshops which bring together a small group of representatives (around nine) that rarely share decision-making spaces: from government officials, businesses, social enterprises, private investors, and nonprofit foundations. In a surprisingly rare move, they are joined by folks with lived experience who are invited to co-lead the design of new solutions.
Omni observed each of the Collaboratory sessions, facilitated debriefs among the core team and lived experts, and collected feedback from co-designers at the conclusion of the process. This provided participants with chances for continuous learning, supported the adaptation of the model itself, and underpinned a flexibility in refining ideas on the journey to becoming viable, impactful, and scalable.
As an issue brief explains, the Collaboratory proposes practical, cross-sector micro-solutions. The theory goes, that piecemeal initiatives combine over time to heal large-scale systemic issues like homelessness.
Improving on Solid Foundations
Rather than totally replace existing provision, it sets out to “leverage the things that are working well in the system” while focussing energy on repairing those that aren’t, says Jean Denious, CEO at Omni. She points out how this framework works because it builds trust and establishes a shared objective between houseless people, agencies, and anyone else wanting to change the system.
Because you’re not trying to tear things down before you build them back up, people can see how this is going to make their jobs easier.
Jean Denious
This is not specific to homelessness, either. The core infrastructure is a transferable model which could potentially be used to address any form of deeply entrenched urban challenges.
“It is very much about the process for how we get to solutions,” Johnna explains. “Because if we can nail that, then we have a mechanism and a framework for how we create change for any topic, not just homelessness and not just in Denver. And that’s a really critical component of all this.”
Jean adds that participants gain “more perspective and understanding” of the issues they’re tasked with addressing, and that presents opportunities for a shift in mindsets and systemic change in multiple crucial environments. “They’re going back to their own jobs with a deeper level of understanding and perspective that has a spreading activation effect.”
Addressing Homelessness with the Collaboratory Process
For now, the focus is on homelessness, and early discussions enabled Elevated Denver to map two distinct stages:
- Newly unhoused people – or those on the cusp – didn’t know where to turn for resources beyond immediate food and shelter provision.
- After three to six months, houseless individuals tend to build a peer network which they rely on for support and sharing accurate information (rather than turn to authorities).
With this in mind, participants in the first Collaboratory were tasked with manoeuvring the cohesive homeless network to support newly or soon-to-be unhoused individuals. The aim was to prevent them from spiralling into deeper crisis.
“They were so prolific in their idea generation,” Johnna recalls, and a pattern formed – most suggestions could be grouped into one of three distinct categories:
- Information campaign – improving knowledge of the available services by putting useful information in view of the people who need it.
- Digital solutions – making personalised support readily available from a smartphone or computer – even engaging in a live chat with lived experts.
- In-person support – face-to-face advice, guidance, information, and referrals.
Early feasibility mapping revealed that an information campaign was unlikely to succeed because, as Johnna says, at the time in Denver, there was “no one true source of information and we might be accidentally marketing something that at the end of the day can’t be fulfilled”.
So, the digital and in-person options were prototyped and spot-tested “live with a number of folks… and far and away people wanted the in-person” option.
Often, we look to digital solutions first and really, when you’re in crisis and there’s a lot going on and you don’t know where to turn, you want another human to talk to you, sit with you, to be able to authentically relate to what you’re going through.
Johnna Flood
Community Resource Connection Hub
The spring of 2025 marked an exciting time: Elevated Denver began a six-month pilot to test the inaugural framework of an in-person support mechanism developed through the Collaboratory.
The Community Resource Connection Hub can be hosted in any safe, non-stigmatised local community space – a library, maybe, or a community centre.
It’s a chance, Johnna explains, for houseless individuals “to come in and talk through” their individual needs with a sympathetic staff member who has lived experience of navigating the system and “wants to help”. They provide “insider knowledge” on the resources that individuals can access and advise on what would and wouldn’t work for them.
For a community used to being given a list of organisations and sent off to fend for themselves, the Hub is refreshingly personal. Staff can access a database of specific resources which shows “in-depth information” in real time, complete with eligibility criteria. They can home in on the services in locations that individuals can get to – and say when they’re open.
Jean describes this is a “humanising experience” which gives people hope. That positive association makes the Hub a familiar “place that they might come back to if they then identify other needs or have additional questions”.
She adds that it is also an opportunity to identify gaps in provision: “If you have 60% of people coming in needing a particular type of resource, but there isn’t one available in a 10- or 20-mile radius, that’s information that’s shared back with the system.”
Image credit: Elevated Denver
A Community of Champions
There is another group involved in the Collaboratory, and they responded extremely positively to the Hub proposal.
Champions are a satellite group of people who show interest in the Collaboratory but are unable to commit the time to participate or are simply not the right fit for the task in hand thus time round.
Similar to a focus group or a control experiment, Champions join the first and last Collaboratory sessions, being presented first with the challenge and later the solution design and are invited to give their feedback, having been kept up to date with developments remotely in between.
“It [the Hub] was met with incredible support,” Johnna confirms. “People really validated that this is needed and not happening in our city right now.” As members of Denver’s city council were among the Champions, this reception hints at a future for the Hub with local authority backing.
Iterative Solutions – and Evaluations
The Collaboratory model has had its share of challenges though.
Even after thoroughly evidencing the need for such an initiative, community agencies and traditional funders were slow to pilot the Hub. Our CityChangers aren’t surprised: in their experience as NGOs, it can be much easier to attract financial support for well-established, low-risk projects backed by a large evidence base than new, innovative ideas responding to clear demand in the community.
But, as Jean says, to affect change where it’s most needed, new concepts must be given a chance to either succeed or fail.
All the things that we know work now, we once didn’t know that they worked – they required someone to invest in that base of knowledge.
Jean Denious
Luckily, one Collaboratory participant was so convinced by the Hub idea that their family foundation granted the financial support needed to launch the pilot. Despite not being a service provider, Elevated Denver stepped forward to host, which gives them more flexibility to adjust to input shaped by a learning infrastructure led by Omni.
Jean points out that evaluations are too often thought of as a change between two static points, at the start and end, but in a multi-step process, iterative reflection and tweaks can open up room for considerable improvements along the way.
An Ecosystem of Learning
That learning has continued to shape the Community Resource Connection Hub, which is currently undergoing testing, and a second round of the Collaboratory, planned for 2026.
For now, the partnership is working to articulate the Collaboratory framework far and wide so that other cities and organisations can already make use of it.
“The core infrastructure can be applied to any challenge, certainly any that have large scale systemic roots to it,” Johnna reminds us.
Time will tell what other localities will use it for, or whether it will result in similar findings as Denver if applied to the issue of homelessness. But that’s of little importance; what matters is that cities now have access to a tool that allows them to understand the local landscape, and one that, most importantly, puts the experts with lived experiences front and centre of both the information acquisition and solution ideation phases.
The Collaboratory Model: Key Takeaways
Benefits:
- Involving people with lived experiences improves knowledge of what works well in an existing system of support, while pinpointing what needs fresh ideas.
- Bringing stakeholders together in facilitated workshops builds the trust required to freely ideate solutions.
- It is not a one-size-fits-all process: by being iterative, the Collaboratory can be shaped to suit the needs of all manner of local communities and respond to diverse, deep-rooted challenges.
Challenges:
- Laying a foundation of trust first can be time-consuming, but this pays off when participants come to effectively and quickly move towards solutions.
- As an incubator for innovative new ideas, outputs from a Collaboratory may struggle to get financial backing due to a system that favours low-risk, familiar solutions.
- A responsible party needs to be willing to take the lead – over several sessions, running a Collaboratory can be a strain on workloads and budgets, especially for smaller entities. Operating in partnership can spread that burden.
How to get started:
- Identify a pertinent and long-term entrenched challenge. It won’t be solved overnight, but chances are that even small shifts will benefit the community and over time combine to make considerable impact.
- Pull together stakeholders who care about the issue and know about existing solutions so that the Collaboratory can build on them and focus energy on filling gaps.
- To get the best result, evaluate at each stage and make iterative changes, rather than missing the nuances of the process by comparing just the start and end points.
For a more detailed look into running a Collaboratory in your city, view the free issue brief, a joint publication between Elevated Denver and Omni Institute.