We can all share in Colorado’s prosperity

Creating a Colorado where every family is financially resilient

By Jill Hawley, Chief Impact Officer

This piece is part of our 50th anniversary perspective series, in which Gary staff will share some of our biggest priorities for the next nine years. Read the first piece in this series, a message from our co-founder Nancy Gary.

I joined Gary Community Ventures almost four years ago. Coming from a background in education and philanthropy, the family economic mobility work that Gary has engaged in over the past five decades was both new and exciting. It felt to me like the missing piece of the work I’d spent most of my career on, because children learn and thrive when their families and communities are thriving. 

What immediately struck me was the foundational belief in ownership that Sam and Nancy Gary instilled in our family economic mobility work. A good education and a good job are not enough. With wages flat and the cost of living soaring, families need wealth — ownership in appreciating assets — to lead lives of choice and prosperity. 

Ownership changes everything. An asset that grows in value builds generational wealth, giving families the freedom to build the lives they want for themselves today and into the future. 

That understanding shaped how Sam and Nancy chose to use their own wealth. By creating Gary Community Ventures 50 years ago, Sam and Nancy demonstrated how to use personal success to strengthen their own family while also investing in the future of communities across Colorado. 

That belief is why so much of Gary’s portfolio has been built around wealth creation through asset ownership. 

Elevation Community Land Trust, which helps income-qualified homebuyers build wealth through homeownership, was incubated within Gary and has since spun off to operate as an independent venture. We later launched the Dearfield Fund to help Coloradans buy their first home. And, we backed micro-loans from the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute to help entrepreneurs build small businesses.

We’ve taken what we’ve learned from each of these efforts and applied it forward. The Dearfield model — a shared-equity down-payment assistance program — served as the model for Schools To Home, which uses tax-payer dollars to help public school employees buy a home. Our early microlending work for entrepreneurs has evolved into a broader employee ownership strategy, helping workers build a stake in the businesses they help grow. And the Ignite Futures Fund further extends this work with the belief that wealth-building should start early, and shouldn’t wait for adulthood or a stable paycheck to begin.

Even with all of this, Colorado families are still behind. The Colorado Essential Wealth Metric shows that 66% of Colorado households don’t have the level of wealth needed to be financially resilient, let alone to prosper. 

While that data point is sobering, there is real reason for hope. 

The same report found that 20% of Colorado families have reached what we call emergent wealth — enough savings to weather a shock, plus a first step toward owning an appreciating asset. We believe it is possible to double the number of Colorado families who have the essential wealth needed to be financially resilient before Gary sunsets in 2035. 

We can’t do this alone, and we never have.

Moving more families further in their wealth journey requires that we all reexamine our assumptions about who builds wealth, how and when because, as the cost of basic needs rise, we can’t ask families to work harder and save more. They are already doing that. 

Instead, we need business, policy and philanthropy to transform our financial and wealth-building systems such that they offer better and more accessible wealth-building programs for families — by design. 

This is something else that Sam believed in deeply: No single sector can solve our greatest challenges alone. Building family wealth at scale will require funders, financial institutions, employers and policymakers to work together, sharing ideas, learning from what has and hasn’t worked, and helping effective solutions reach every Colorado family, not just the ones lucky enough to find them first.

If you’re curious about this, I invite you to join us in building wealth for Colorado kids and families. You can reach out to me directly at jhawley@garycommunity.org or join our mailing list to stay up to date on our latest work.

Gary sends a regular email update – called the Workbench – about our work in progress. Join the email list to stay close to this work and to find opportunities to partner with us. We want and need your questions, ideas and feedback.