About Us
Commún started with 500 conversations among neighbors. Today it's a movement harnessing community power to meet collective needs in the face of displacement.
A Community Center as a Resilience Strategy
At Commún, we envision a community center as an act of resilience. Our community knows what we need to thrive, and our differences across language, culture, age, lived experience, and skill sets is what makes us strong, nimble, and creative. Through partnerships, community leadership, widespread engagement, and relationship building, we are engaging the dreaming minds, hopeful hearts, and down-to-earth skills of all of our community, centering the needs in our community that are most impacted by institutional racism, discrimination, poverty, and injustice.
We seek to create a space that is welcoming, inclusive, and interactive, bringing people together across all social strata to build understanding, trust, and a sense of belonging. We believe that having a safe, resource rich, and inclusive space will enable the kind of creativity and collaboration that will enable our community to build for ourselves what we need in order to thrive in even the most trying times.
In the past three years, our Southwest Denver based team has:
70% of participants bring friends, family,
or neighbors to talk about mental health topics
95% of participants endorse some change or improvement in how they feel after attending a mental health series
Distributed 44,000 boxes of free, fresh, culturally appropriate food
Activated and cultivated 32 garden plots farmed by community residents
Engaged 600 residents in conversation about their dreams, needs, and strengths
Trained 17 residents as community organizers
Created 42 jobs at communally decided wages
Hosted 36 paid trainings on requested topics such as communication and computer skills
The Navigation Program has successfully
held 6 resource/outreach events in 2024
What’s in a Name
(pronounced like COMMUN-ity)
Commún is an invented spelling of the verb commune (as in to commune with each other). We put action into the noun “community,” reminding ourselves of and holding ourselves accountable to the joy and hard work that it takes to cultivate community across income, language, race, age, and other distinctions. We chose the word and the spelling to be accessible in both Spanish and English, the primary languages spoken in Southwest Denver. In Spanish, the word común means common, signifying the every-day neighborly feeling that we seek to generate with each other.
Who We Are
Commún was founded in a Southwest Denver living room when residents came together to discuss the growing need to address gentrification, displacement, and a lack of community gathering space in the neighborhood. With the sale of the Loretto Heights campus just a mile away, we knew that our community would continue to change at an accelerated rate.
After 500 one-on-one conversations with neighbors, Commún began launching community-identified programs that would make our community stronger and more resilient in the face of change. Through community meetings, workshops, and a growing sense of belonging and mutual support, Commún grows community power to meet collective needs. Commún operates with the goal and practice of being community led, meaning that all of our programs are identified, designed, developed, and led by community members most impacted by the issue we are working to solve.
