Celebrating Our 40th Anniversary

The original endowment of The Colorado Trust was $191 million. At the time of the sale of PSL (Presbyterian/St. Luke’s) Healthcare Corporation, the medical center was the largest health care provider in the region.

Some of The Colorado Trust’s earliest initiatives sought to provide services and more shelter options for domestic violence victims; improve prenatal and maternal health care, especially among low-income and underserved families; establish more primary care services in rural parts of the state; and increase knowledge of disease prevention and health awareness through educational campaigns.

Colorado Trust funding helped 38 Colorado counties obtain emergency telecommunications services, including technology for people living with hearing impairment or loss. This effort has since been credited with saving many lives across rural Colorado.

The Colorado Trust gave grants to 28 communities to help them identify, prioritize and address health issues impacting them at a local level. This led to new dental and medical clinics across the state and laid the foundation for the transportation district in the Roaring Fork Valley.

The Colorado Trust was an early supporter of Educare Colorado, which eventually became Qualistar Early Learning. The organization helped create standardized metrics to measure the quality of early childhood care and assisted parents in locating high-quality providers across the state.

The Colorado Violence Prevention Initiative provided funding in 26 communities that eventually resulted in efforts to reduce handgun violence, especially among youth, and antiviolence education curricula for K-12 schools.

For over a decade, The Colorado Trust supported research and development for a nurse home-visitation program to help high-risk, first-time mothers and their children lead healthier lives. The program eventually became Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), now implemented in dozens of states nationwide. The Trust also funded the work of Invest in Kids, a nonprofit organization that serves as a statewide catalyst and resource for Colorado communities interested in operating the NFP program.

The Colorado Trust joined Rose Community Foundation and Caring for Colorado Foundation to establish the nonprofit Colorado Health Institute (CHI). In the years since, CHI has become a trusted resource for nonpartisan information and data related to health care, health policy, health equity and more.

The Colorado Trust’s Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families Initiative (SIRFI) supported 23 organizations that provided mental health or cultural adjustment services to immigrants and refugees. Building on SIRFI, additional funding later supported 19 Colorado communities to help immigrants become more involved in their children’s schools, have easier access to English-language classes and participate in mentorship opportunities.

The Colorado Trust’s Bullying Prevention initiative helped schools and community-based organizations to adopt methods to prevent bullying and bullying-related behaviors, and it found that higher academic achievement occurred when students and teachers have high-trust relationships and are willing to intervene in bullying behavior. The 45 grantees estimated reaching 50,000 young people and adults in 40 Colorado counties through the initiative.

The Colorado Trust supported various efforts to increase and expand health care access and coverage across Colorado, including simplifying Medicaid and Child Health Plan Plus enrollment, increasing community outreach and education programs, and aligning coordinated care and financial incentives for providers. The Trust also spent a decade funding the Colorado Health Access Survey (managed by CHI), the most extensive survey of health care coverage, access and utilization in Colorado. The 2015 iteration provided one of the earliest and most comprehensive looks at the impact of the Affordable Care Act in Colorado.

This twice-yearly event, hosted by the Community Resource Center, has helped strengthen nonprofit-funder relations and address critical needs in rural communities across Colorado. In 2010, The Colorado Trust began making grants to nonprofit organizations through the RPD events and has also provided funding to the Community Resource Center to run the program.

People most affected by challenges should play a lead role in determining how to address them. The Colorado Trust’s Community Partnerships initiative sought to bring this to life. It eventually provided resources and funding for community leaders to advocate for change by identifying assets and barriers to health equity in their communities and then proposing and implementing solutions. Organizers engaged with their communities to build awareness of the many issues that can impact health and well-being, including housing stability, food access, educational attainment and systemic racism.

Health Equity Advocacy was a multiyear funding initiative informed by the belief that building a strong field of advocates—rather than individual advocacy organizations operating in isolation—would lead to greater sustainability and advocates’ ability to respond to a changing political climate. The Colorado Trust also ran the Health Equity Learning Series, which included recurring speaker events featuring national experts discussing barriers to health and professionally facilitated discussions about the speeches held in communities across the state.

The Colorado Trust issued more than 100 grants to address emergent and critical needs arising from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Colorado. More than $7 million in grantmaking went toward food relief, housing stability and other necessities, especially for the state’s most underserved communities and populations.

More than 90 residents from across the state participated in a free 18-month education and leadership training program and curriculum, which was focused on health equity to build participants’ capacity to improve the well-being of their communities. To ensure that program participants had the necessary backing to complete the program, dedicated grantee organizations in their region provided support and coordination.

Profiles of some of our most significant past funding initiatives are available online.