Facilitating Collaboration Across Colorado Communities
At the Civic Canopy, we work alongside neighbors, coalitions, and organizations to strengthen the well-being of Colorado’s communities. We ultimately aim to build a Colorado where all people can participate, prosper, and thrive.
To achieve this vision, we create the conditions where the many work as one for the good of all. As facilitators and coaches, we support people to work better together through dialogue and deliberation. Whether that’s at a public forum, coalition gathering, or board meeting, we help people navigate conflict, build trust, and collaborate toward shared goals.
The Power of Civic Health
Governments make rules and businesses make money, but neither can solve problems without people helping each other. That’s where we come in.
We work in the civic space, helping people harness their love for community to generate solutions to our most pressing challenges. What makes our civic health strong is more than just voting—it’s about people talking, listening, and solving problems together. It happens when we take care of our streets and parks, our neighbors, and our community. But it doesn’t happen by accident, and it often requires us to work with other people to create the places we call home.
The Civic Canopy strengthens Coloradoans’ ability to collaborate by providing tools for engaging your community, collective decision-making, and dialogue across differences.
Growing the Civic Canopy
If we think of our communities like a forest, we play the role of the canopy. Just like a forest canopy acts as a protective infrastructure that benefits the whole ecosystem, strong community ties help people thrive together. Formed by the connection among the many trees, the canopy offers protection from the sun and elements that allows the life below it to grow. Similarly, strong connections amongst partners–whether they’re working to end homelessness, provide easy access to food, or build cities where people can move and play–creates a climate of trust and good will. The research is clear: communities that are more engaged civically have better health outcomes. Rather than working on one issue, we work on civic life, which allows all these elements to work together, creating something bigger than anyone could do alone.
Our Core Services
We provide a variety of services that strengthen Colorado’s civic fabric by making good on the American promise of E Pluribus Unum, or out of the many, one. Through collaboration, community engagement, and collective decision-making, we embrace both our diversity and differences, while weaving a larger “we.” These services build the skills and capacities needed for the many to work as one for the good of all.
Group Facilitation
We facilitate dialogue, deliberation, public meetings, retreats, and team-building processes that help groups envision their future, navigate conflict, and build consensus.
See How Civic Canopy Supports Communities
This short video offers a look at how we work alongside communities, neighbors, and organizations to support civic health, collaboration, and collective decision-making across Colorado.
Programs & Initiatives
In addition to facilitation and coaching services, we offer programs and initiatives that support learning and connection across our statewide network, building civic infrastructure for the long term.
Community Impact
Our facilitation, coaching, and collaboration work lead to plans that get used — and processes that hold after we’re gone. The following case studies show what that looks like across Colorado.
See how ripple effect mapping helped the Packard Foundation understand its impact across the entire community of Pueblo.
Discover the way Eagle Valley Community Foundation engaged with Latine leaders and entrepreneurs to co-design Elevar, a program designed to increase leadership of color in the community.
Learn how a group of six counties in the San Luis Valley used deliberation to build consensus on how to spend dollars to combat the opioid crisis.
Understand the way philanthropic organizations aligned around a central mission to end hunger throughout the state
View the way 50 community members modeled inclusive decision-making with Colorado Access to improve health outcomes when Black Coloradoans give birth.
See how Colorado’s oldest town, San Luis, used softball tournaments as a community engagement for their new recreation plan.
Want to explore a project with us?
Build Relationships
Foster connections among people and across a broad network of partners
Develop Capacity
Create the culture, conditions, and capacity for transformational change
Catalyze Collective Action
Mobilize communities to create the systems they need to thrive
Our approach.
How we work.
Across our projects, trainings, and events, we increase Coloradans’ ability to collaborate.
Develop Capacity
Create the culture, conditions, and capacity for transformational change.
Across our projects, trainings, and events, we increase Coloradoans’ ability to collaborate. Our staff specializes in community building, inclusive community engagement, facilitating dialogue and deliberation, collective decision-making, strategic planning, narrative change, evaluation and learning, systems change, and collective impact. When you begin a project with Canopy, we’ll start by asking you to what degree you want to perform these services for you or learn to do them yourself. Opportunities to develop capacity include:
Build Relationships
Foster connections among people and across a broad network of partners.
After more than two decades of capacity building, there are thousands of incredible leaders throughout the state working to strengthen our civic spaces. We work to connect these leaders and provide space for thought partnership and learning. Opportunities to connect include:
Catalyze Collective Action
Mobilize communities to create the systems they need to thrive.
With a statewide network and the tools to work together, transformational change is possible. We provide the containers for this work to occur. Opportunities include: