New Futures Blossoming At Shared Ground
Summer has been a busy season for Shared Ground, and as we look toward autumn we have an opportunity to gather ourselves and reflect on the community we’ve created together. Our first year of operations is nearly complete. In that time we’ve held around 120 distinct types of events including markets, religious gatherings, dance and movement workshops, activist workshops, and ecology classes to name just a few. This is an incredible accomplishment for our small congregation, and we should all be proud of what we are achieving here.
🥕 Setting New Roots
During our Town Hall meeting in June, we collectively made the decision to renew our current lease at the end of September. However, since then, new information has come to light that makes this vision infeasible. Our options for subletting space to businesses have been significantly restricted by the building’s covenant with residents in the neighborhood. We also learned that our future rent will be far higher than had originally been estimated. There is no path toward paying the actual rent that will be required to keep this building in the coming months. The leadership of Shared Ground is rapidly reorienting toward finding a new location for our organization.
We’re already very excited about some of the potential locations we are finding throughout Denver. The options before us will all be less expensive, require less physical maintenance, and the organizations that run these spaces are more in alignment with our goals. We have an incredible opportunity to choose from among many possible futures for Shared Ground. We'll be sending out a survey to help guide this decision making process soon.
We are also in a moment of transition among the leadership of our organization. Burnout has continued to be a struggle for us as it is with most volunteer-led organizations, and new people are stepping up to fill in the gaps. The Steering Committee and Operations Teams have elected to merge in the interest of reducing overhead and improving communication and decision making capacity. In practice this means some of the people that have been informally acting in leadership roles will be taking on more formal leadership positions. As part of this transition we’ll be thinking about our decision making processes and how we can reduce the distance between leadership and the communities we serve.
With both our physical location and our leadership structure in flux, it’s fair to say that the coming months will be a challenging transition for us. We need volunteers and financial donations to assist with the tasks before us:
Fundraising and grant writing
Moving out, cleaning, and wrapping up our obligations with the current landlord
Moving in, unpacking, and establishing ourselves within the new location
Stewarding the new space
✊ Get Involved!
Contact Nona or send donations through OpenCollective
Check our calendar for some of our upcoming events! The lounge is open for all members during our Member Open Hours.
Let’s make the best use of this space while we still can. Book an event!
Hop on the Shared Ground Discord to participate in our online conversations about event programming, membership, resource-sharing and more.
