On a Wednesday evening in March 2025, after a wave of federal funding cuts and policy shifts, more than 120 people packed into the Alliance Center and asked each other a question that had been circulating for months: Where do we go from here?
The building was filled with climate advocates and farmers, policy workers and entrepreneurs, people who had just lost federal contracts and people who were trying to figure out what came next. Folks could descend into the basement to share their anger and fears if they needed to, or they could move up progressively through the five floors of the building to elevate the conversation to the shared assets and resources, or core values that would guide us through this challenging season.
“We need each other right now,” said one participant quietly, when asked why she had come.
Meeting that need became our compass for the year.
Our civic fabric is under strain. In the United States, the physical spaces where people once gathered informally—to share ideas, to find common ground, to simply be in community—are disappearing. A quarter of US residents reported feeling lonelier than before the pandemic. The organizations doing climate and justice work in Colorado felt all of this acutely in 2025: in lost contracts, in staff cuts, in the particular exhaustion of trying to hold a long-term vision inside so many short-term crises.
The Alliance Center exists to counter these conditions. We are a home for the people doing this work: nonprofit leaders, independent journalists, entrepreneurs, and advocates figuring out what comes next. And we are civic infrastructure; a trusted place where people can work in proximity, build relationships, and develop the shared capacity that makes progress possible. We steward the conditions that allow the community to endure… and to move forward.
2025 tested whether that infrastructure holds. What follows is what we learned by staying in the work together.
