Southwest Denver Just Got $20 Million to Build a Climate Resiliency Hub

Southwest Denver will soon be home to a climate resiliency hub on the Loretto Heights Campus thanks to a $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Denver nonprofit Commún has been developing plans and gathering funding to turn Machebeuf Hall, the former student union building, into a community center since 2020. With the grant plus other funds raised, the organization now has 80 percent of the estimated $40 million needed to bring the aging building into the future.

That future will provide a community gathering space with a donation-based grocery store, a commercial kitchen and – thanks to that EPA grant – rooftop solar, energy storage, heat pumps for temperature regulation and charging stations for electric vehicles and e-bikes.

When natural disasters like fires hit Colorado, the community center will open its doors to those who are displaced.

“This space will be the beating heart of a community by Southwest Denver residents, for Southwest Denver residents,” Senator John Hickenlooper said at a celebratory event on January 18. “We’re grateful EPA heard us out on why this is such an important project to fund.”

Westside Investment Partners purchased the former Loretto Heights nursing school campus for $16.5 million in 2017. Shortly after, Commún executive director Margaret Brugger asked Westside’s Mark Witkiewicz if he would be up for letting Commún build a community center as part of the master plan for the campus, which envisions a mixed-use development that includes 3,000 new housing units in the long-underserved area.

The Loretto Heights campus was first built in 1864 as a boarding school for girls, followed by incarnations as various colleges, a high school, a nursing school and a military training ground. The campus’s Machebuef Hall was last used to host classes for the Denver School of Science and Technology.

Brugger and her fellow co-founders started Commún in 2020 to create community programming with the vision of renovating the physical building to house that work. Westside finalized a deal to sell Machebuef Hall to Commún for $3.25 million in 2022 in partnership with Urban Land Conservancy.

Commún’s multi-language programming began in March 2020 out of a small local church, and members quickly realized that food insecurity was one of the biggest challenges the community faced. The organization’s current food-share program now offers a weekly meetup for people to get free groceries as well as food delivery for people who can’t make it.

The Loretto Heights Community Resiliency Hub in Machebuef Hall will expand and build upon those offerings. According to plans, the 40,000 square foot space will offer office rental space for nonprofits, a coffee shop for youth job training, mental health offices, climate resources, mixed retail space and classrooms.

The EPA Community Change Grants Program allocated almost $1.6 billion to projects across the country that reduce pollution, increase community climate resilience and build community capacity. Commún heard about the grant from Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency, which became a partner on the grant application.

Along with a solar panel system, the building will have an agrivoltaic garden space that activates the land around and under the panels. The plan is for the building to be all-electric with one key exemption: “We will have backup generators, including diesel, so that we can be running on different power sources depending on what’s going on,” describes Andrea Savage, associate director of Commún.

Not only will the community center be there for people in good times, it will be built to withstand hard times caused by nearby wildfires and other climate disasters.

“We will be processing leftover food from restaurants and from the grocery store to have frozen meals prepared in case of disaster, and we will have an HVAC-assist wildfire setting on our HVAC system that can easily be flipped on during smoke events, so that we can all breathe clean air when we need to,” Savage says.

Commún has a team of Climate Promotoras, which has been dedicated to building climate resiliency in southwest Denver for the last two years by helping people install rain barrels, plant trees and create emergency kits.

“That’s why this Community Change Grant from the EPA fit so perfectly, because the hub was already focusing on community resilience,” Savage says. “We do hope that this will become one of a network of resilience hubs across the front range and across the United States and the world. Because, as you can see in [Los Angeles] right now or just in other climate disasters, having a place where people can come together and provide resources for each other is what creates resilience.”

The federal government’s investment in the historically underserved community of southwest Denver is validating to the people involved with Commún who have been working toward this goal. The grant had a strong community engagement component, with Brugger sharing that Commún had over 2,000 individual conversations in Spanish, English, Arabic and Vietnamese to be sure the community supported the idea behind the grant.

“That right there is a statement about the importance of this work,” Brugger says. “Is it important because the community knows what they need to thrive.”

Commún still needs to raise another $10 million to fully fund the vision but will provide its original programming and services in the meantime. Right now, the organization is hosting language classes for Spanish, English and Arabic on Wednesdays, where people who speak those languages mix and converse to teach each other. In the summer there are gardening programs, and every month Commún hosts a climate workshop.

“It was always Commún’s plan to grow at a rate that when we open our giant building we’ll be ready to activate it pretty fully,” Brugger says.

Organizers are still searching for funding to fulfill the entire vision, but asbestos abatement, which is needed before any other elements of the project can be built, is projected to start this spring.