One Community Project

Location: Leadville, CO
Project Site: onecommunityproject.com

Leadville is an old mining town shaped by western frontiersmanship and risk.

It’s history is built on the ancestral lands of the Ute people and transformed by the back-breaking labor of immigrants during the late 19th century. These communities fueled the region’s prosperity and formed the bedrock of Colorado’s early labor and union movements.

When you look at old photos of the historic mining operations, the scale is staggering. Climax mine in its heyday had a residential encampment to house workers, which was literally picked up and transported down the mountain and is the neighborhood on the northside of Leadville. A small unassuming park nestled within is called Ice Palace, an odd but charming name if you don’t know the history. It’s so named for the site of the 1896 Leadville Ice Palace, a truly massive ice castle designed to save the city’s declining silver-mining economy by attracting tourists. Though it only stood for three months and bankrupted investors, the experience and scale must have been near-magic for those who got to witness it, and it remains a legendary architectural marvel in Colorado history.

Setting the Scene

Economic vulnerability has been a persistent force heavily balanced on a two-prong economy: extraction and tourism. A boom-bust mining economy, the community has historically steadied itself in the gaps in between, and now the future of extraction is uncertain, and a seasonal tourism economy that, in the summer can swell the county population by three times, hasn’t returned much to the community in terms of local investment.

The economic base has struggled to anchor a strong and balanced housing market on its own. Leadville has served an important role as the affordable housing base for neighboring resort economies. But the market has shifted over the last 15 years, expedited by COVID-19, primarily building custom homes for people chasing a home-away-from-home and remote work flexibility instead of the people who actually work locally or in the neighboring economies.

Housing pressure and economic conditions have made life here materially harder

Working families getting priced out, older housing stock often in need of renovation/work, manufactured home communities (the closest thing left to affordable housing) sitting on uncertain ground, homeownership collapse as once-affordable homes going from comprising most of the market to almost none of it in four years.

The Latino community carries more of that weight than anyone else, specifically because the housing market is failing renters hardest, and Latino residents are renters at a much higher rate than everyone else.

All of it adds up to daily life being harder and less stable for many in the community.

The place itself is also under physical pressure — an abundance of visitors creating a sense of being “loving it to death,” a warming climate making wildfire a real and growing threat to a community sitting at the headwaters of a river four states depend on.

The community’s ability to make progress on these brick-and-mortar challenges was getting hamstrung by what was happening in its civic environment.

External Pressure on housing costs

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Warm season wildfire Danger

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Cliques and Factions in local affairs

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Uncertainty Regarding a Mining-based economy

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Identity and economic issues caused by Tourism

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Introducing Anne Schneider

Anne Schneider is the county’s community planning and development director. She has deep generational roots in the community. In her role at the county and as an individual, she is intimately familiar with the forces acting on this community and the stakes at hand when the community has been operating without direction and vision, akin to being lost in the wilderness, looking for some way to “set our north.” She recognized that something had to shake up how this community made decisions together, or none of the rest was going to change either.

The conditions for joint work between County and City in place: shared problems, mutual interest, and the will on both sides to try something new.

A Shift in Process

County leadership was becoming more professionalized over the last several years, seeking out professional and technical expertise to establish more structure and local accountability. Getting there meant the locus of local authority shifted towards something more formal. Decisions and verbal agreements that had been made over a handshake stopped counting, and instead were run through a formal process, and the reallocation of promised resources had caused a real rift of trust.

Two pressures landing together, not one causing the other, but both eroding trust at once. Distrust turning into frustration, and frustration into cynicism. The harder it got to do things, the harder it got to believe anything could get done at all. A long history of things happening to Leadville and Lake County from outside primes distrust before this specific moment even starts. It’s a cycle that feeds itself.
People retreat into camps, defining community by those who agree, growing factionalism. And this is where it compounds: when trust breaks down, the community’s actual capacity to solve its material problems breaks down with it. Getting anything done gets harder exactly when the material pressure means more needs to get done.

And what this all has cost many in the community the capacity to imagine a different future. But doing nothing is a choice with a cost, not a neutral default.

Continuing drift means continuing loss: families leaving, the place being remade into something community members recognize less and less.

Bring People together

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

CTA

Give People Agency

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

CTA

Create a vision of the future

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

CTA

The One Community Approach

This community had reason not to trust another process. Years of stalled decisions are part of how it got here in the first place, and when trust is low, decisions stall. So before any planning happened, the work had to be relationship work. Not the other way around.

Finding partners willing to put a name to the project took real effort. CB and local partners did the legwork. They were honest about how badly trust had been damaged, and honest that fixing it wasn’t going to happen fast. Government partners had to show up differently: listening more, defending less, not trying to control how the story got told.

800+: Total Individual Interactions
12: Performances given by local storytellers
24: Action Team Meetings

The Process

Finding Partners

Finding partners willing to put a name to the project took real effort. CB and local partners did the legwork. They were honest about how badly trust had been damaged, and honest that fixing it wasn't going to happen fast. Government partners had to show up differently: listening more, defending less, not trying to control how the story got told.

Subheading

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Subheading

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Subheading

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Making Lasting Change

No single visit did this. It was people showing up again, telling people plainly what was and wasn’t decided yet, not disappearing between conversations. That’s what it takes to get someone willing to try again. Christian said as much: “There’s been a lot more willingness to give this another shot and turn a new leaf.”

Once people were in the room, the job became getting them to actually talk to each other. That started with values, not strategy. Two of the six that came out of this process speak directly to it: Nurturing Our Roots, and Working Together. Getting there meant asking people what they loved about this place before asking them to weigh in on anything technical. A revived local storytelling night, the Yak, brought forty-five people together to say it out loud. A written campaign, Stories that Root Us, collected 15 more. Small, next to the full scope of the process. But it’s where the values on paper started to sound like people’s own words.

CB doesn’t avoid the hard topics in a process like this. It looks for them. That meant real information, and asking people to work through actual trade-offs together instead of just picking sides….

Caption here

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Name of Person Title of Person

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Name of Person 2 Title of Person 2

One Community Project

Leadville is an old mining town shaped by western frontiersmanship and risk.

Setting the Scene

Housing pressure and economic conditions have made life here materially harder