Community Builders

Community Builders works on the ground with communities in the Mountain West to build civic capacity and solve growth-oriented economic development challenges to create more livable places. To date, Community Builders has completed 40 community assistance projects, training more than 800 local leaders and catalyzing $60 million in broader community-based investments.

The Problem
Small, rural communities are experiencing ever-growing inequality amidst shifts in economies and populations. In particular, the Mountain West is growing quickly, with multiple states in the region listed among the country’s top 10 fastest-growing populations from 2010 to 2020. However, this growth has not been uniform across the region. In Colorado, Denver’s population grew by 23% from 2000 to 2015, while the population of the state’s rural areas grew only by 4% during a similar time frame, and many rural counties saw 10% or higher drops in population.

As small cities and municipalities face rapid socioeconomic and demographic shifts, political divisions and tensions between traditional and emerging ways of life can hinder communities from thriving. Addressing these bricks-and-mortar issues is made more difficult by increasingly fragmented social discourse. The result is a lack of civic capacity to navigate the development challenges and to marshal the resources and political will for meaningful policy, systems, and physical change at the community scale.

The Solution
Community Builders empowers and enables local leaders — from community officials to citizen advocates and business leaders — with the tools, information, and support they need to create more livable places. Through their training and assistance programs, Community Builders works shoulder-to-shoulder with community partners to craft practical solutions tailored to their specific challenges.

To build healthy, equitable, and prosperous communities to improve people’s lives today and ensure a sustainable tomorrow, Community Builders focuses on:

1. Strengthening Local Leadership: Community Builders fosters a culture of civic leadership, empowering local leaders to drive greater impact. To do this, they provide place-based leadership and engagement to communities ready to face the challenges of today and realize their ability to change. They build up local leadership capacity to create a shared vision, define problems, and identify solutions to help them find areas of potential and ways to change systems at their root level.

2. Inspiring Community Action: Community Builders helps build the capacity necessary for communities to take action. Through tools, insights, and analysis, they enable communities to shape their own future. Community Builders works directly in counties and towns, hand-in-hand with local partners, cultivating agency and creating civic capacity to realize a shared vision and implement innovative strategies.

3. Enabling On-the-Ground Progress: Community Builders delivers tangible results by collaborating with local partners to establish better policies and programs — providing resources that support the implementation of best practices, ensuring sustainable progress.