Dear friends, supporters of The Civic Canopy,

The second Friday of May was my last day as a Civic Canopy staff person. I’ve accepted another position with The Colorado Health Foundation that maintains the ability to continue working in community toward a thriving future with many of the same partners and team I have been working with at the Canopy.

Working at the Canopy has been a curious, fun, stretching, relationship filled, and creative time. I could run down a list of wonderful skills learned and accomplishments that I have been able to be a part of, but what stands out to me are the relationships with the people I had the pleasure of working with and our alignment to build a more just and equitable world. In a mobile home park in Eagle County, a library on the east side of Pueblo, a community health center near the foothills of the Denver metro area, in a coffee shop in Alamosa, on a walk in Aurora, at a school in Manzanola, in the hallways of the Tramway Building where the Canopy office is located, on a Zoom meeting where people can see the sun or moon depending on their time zone; there is movement and progress happening.

We commonly see our communities as strong, talented, beautiful, and yet so many are not thriving, do not have good places to live, good food to eat, quality means to get around, enough connections that uplift, or multiple pathways of reaching self-defined success. We hold the status and progress of those who are farthest from thriving in our hearts, heads, and work. We find places to plug into the unfinished work toward a more just and equitable world. The work is worthy of effort, energy, heart, mind, soul, and it calls people from every corner of the state to create alternatives.

The work started way before any of us got here and will continue after each of us leave. Knowing that the business of this work moves forward with each connection, strategy, day, meeting, network map, process, song, and dance focused on progress toward a better world; I write this letter to not say “goodbye” but “see you later”. We have unfinished work to do- individually and collectively. It is our duty to stay connected, to keep working, and to realize our dreams or at least make them more in reach for the generations to come.

I look forward to seeing you and working with you in our unfinished work.

Keep on moving,

Ageno