News Release
[November 24, 2025 – Denver, Colo.]: Caring for Denver Foundation is excited to announce more than $14.5 million in grant funding to 24 community-based organizations dedicated to addressing gaps in mental health and substance misuse care. These grants were made in the Foundation’s Community-Centered Solutions funding area, which addresses mental health and substance misuse needs in Denver by expanding trauma-informed, culturally reflective, and community-rooted care.
Founded and funded by the people of Denver through a sales tax initiative, Caring for Denver Foundation invests in programs that address the city’s mental health and substance misuse needs.
“We’re seeing a growing demand for diverse interventions that meet people where they are and reflect the lived experiences of our communities. These funded programs will deepen connection and belonging by bringing support into trusted spaces and creating safe places for Denver residents to heal in,” said Lorez Meinhold, Caring for Denver’s executive director.
Funding supports a wide continuum of services from outpatient therapy and clinical training, to peer-led recovery, care coordination, and hospital-to-community substance misuse and mental health care transitions. Together, these organizations are improving access for Denver residents who face the greatest barriers, including working families, people experiencing homelessness, survivors of violence, communities with limited access to care, older adults, veterans, and individuals navigating severe and persistent mental illness or substance misuse disorders.
Community-Centered Solutions
Caring for Denver Foundation approved 24 grants totaling more than $14 million to community-based nonprofit organizations providing services for City and County of Denver residents in the Community-Centered Solutions priority area.
- Ardent Grove Foundation – Supporting Where Healing Takes Root, which cultivates Denver’s mental health ecosystem and creates lasting impact by expanding this organization’s clinical training program and fostering trauma-informed clinicians grounded in equity, compassion, and high-quality practice.
- The Blue Bench – Maintaining this organization’s continuum of care for mental health services, ensuring equitable, culturally responsive therapy, and sustaining bilingual/cross-cultural capacity.
- Center for Work Education and Employment – Providing coordinated, stackable, trauma-informed mental health services to low-income Denver residents as part of comprehensive career readiness programming with wraparound support.
- Colorado Artists in Recovery – Expanding free, peer-led, arts-based recovery in Denver by hiring a full-time Program Coordinator/Peer Navigator, launching All Pathways Creative Recovery groups, making warm handoffs to trusted providers, and delivering workshops in trusted community spaces.
- Colorado Changemakers Collective – Supporting Healing Together, a community-driven project shaped by 300 community members. It provides accessible, culturally relevant mental health support through trusted Changemakers reducing stigma, expanding access, and building resilience in Denver.
- Colorado Gerontological Society – Providing telehealth counseling sessions with licensed clinicians to older adults, who are then transitioned to a volunteer Telephone Buddy for ongoing support and regular well-being checks.
- Colorado Health Network, Inc. – Embedding behavioral health clinicians in the syringe access program, offering crisis stabilization, SBIRT-based interventions, and linkage to care to build trust with people who use drugs, support harm reduction, expand medication-assisted treatment access, and guide clients toward recovery.
- Colorado Village Collaborative – Continuing the organization’s Supportive Services program, which provides peer support, navigation of recovery and mental health support options, and clinical mental health services across three micro-community program models.
- The Delores Project – Ensuring comprehensive therapeutic services to individuals experiencing homelessness in a shelter and supportive housing environment. These onsite behavioral health services include individual counseling and support groups, as well as warm referrals to essential mental health supports.
- Denver Health Foundation – Expanding behavioral health care coordination, interagency collaboration, and strengthening transitions, focusing on priority populations, including patients transitioning from inpatient behavioral health to outpatient care, transitional-aged youth, and individuals leaving jail.
- The Gathering Place – Delivering low-barrier and trauma-informed navigation, recovery planning, and recovery-focused groups to eliminate barriers to behavioral health care for women, transgender, and nonbinary people experiencing poverty and homelessness.
- Haven of Hope – Enhancing services by adding peer coaches to complement licensed clinical care, strengthening stabilization, recovery, and developmental outcomes across the organization.
- Karis Community – Offering a community-oriented residential program for adults managing serious and persistent mental illness as well as co-occurring substance use disorders.
- Kind Therapy Inc. – Expanding free and affordable, culturally responsive outpatient therapy for immigrant, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse Denver residents. Pairing care with therapist affinity groups, supervision, and training, the goal is to reduce inequities and strengthen the workforce.
- Maria Droste Counseling Center – Providing trauma-informed, culturally responsive behavioral health and substance misuse care by training and supporting licensed providers and clinical trainees in identifying and offering substance misuse services and/or appropriate referrals.
- Mercy Housing – Enhancing on-site peer recovery support services for low-income adults recovering from substance use and mental health disorders living at four service-enriched affordable housing communities in Denver.
- Rocky Mountain Welcome Center – Sustaining and expanding programming that transforms how Denver’s newest resident families access mental health care, turning community wisdom into healing action while building pathways to long-term psychological wellness and successful integration.
- Rose Andom Center – Offering behavioral health and substance use services for survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, reducing barriers to access through tailored referrals and partnerships that deliver survivor-centered, trauma-informed care in a safe, trusted setting.
- Servicios de la Raza – Providing culturally responsive, trauma-informed, linguistically responsive, and community-centered mental health and substance misuse treatment services, with a primary focus on low-income Latino Denverites.
- Sobriety House, Inc. – Supporting SoHo’s hospital-to-community recovery program, which provides two dedicated treatment beds, case management, transportation, and psychiatric care to ensure seamless transitions, reduce relapse, and strengthen recovery for Denver residents with SUD.
- Spark the Change Colorado – Improving Denver’s mental health workforce with learning cohorts, recruitment of diverse bilingual volunteers, low-cost continuing education, and program evaluation improvement, enhancing access and outcomes for underserved communities.
- Step Denver – Continuing a residential peer recovery program built on the principles of sobriety, work, accountability, and community. Staff with lived experience help men with nowhere else to turn achieve long-term recovery, repair family relationships, build stability, and get their life back.
- University of Denver – Providing comprehensive mental health services to Denver’s military and veteran families. In collaboration with Rocky Mountain Veterans Advocacy Project, integrated programming will improve access to services, culturally competent care, and community connection.
- Vivent Health – Offering LifePoint harm reduction, Thrive Navigation, and community education services to unhoused people who use drugs in order to prevent overdoses, reduce substance misuse, improve mental wellbeing, and foster trust in and access to recovery systems.
About Caring for Denver Foundation
Caring for Denver Foundation was founded and funded by the people of Denver with overwhelming voter support to address Denver’s mental health and substance misuse needs by growing community-informed solutions, dismantling stigma, and turning the community’s desire to help into action. Guided by community input, the organization has funded more than $228 million in the areas of alternatives to jail, community-centered solutions, youth, and special initiatives since it began.