Rooted in Colorado: Celebrating Eight Communities, Four Years, and $55 Million in Belief
- jholmanroc
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
On the afternoon of July 15th, board members, funders and staff filed into the Farmhouse Room at Breckenridge Brewery in Littleton for something Thistle has been building toward for four years: a party marking the full deployment of Colorado's Acquisition Pool. Some arrived early for an optional visit to Meadowood Cooperative, one of the eight communities the pool helped protect. Others came straight from toasts.
The Acquisition Pool started as a question. Four years ago, a group of partners sat down and asked what it would actually take to make sure that when a manufactured home community goes up for sale, the people who live there have a real shot at buying it. Conventional financing wasn’t built for that moment. It typically requires a large share of the purchase price in cash up front, a tough bar to clear on the timeline a sale demands, no matter how ready a community is to organize and buy. So, the partners built something different: a $55 million pool of below-market capital, purpose-built to move fast when a community home is on the line.
That pool is now fully deployed. It has protected eight resident-owned communities across Colorado: Paradise Village Cooperative, La Luna Community Cooperative, Golden Hills Community Cooperative, Evergreen Community Park Cooperative, Meadowood Cooperative, Aspen Basalt Homeowners Inc., Mountain Valley MHP Cooperative Inc., and Hermosa Village Cooperative Inc. Eight communities, eight boards, eight groups of neighbors who now own the ground under their homes instead of hoping the next buyer treats them fairly.
The room reflected how many hands actually built this. Meadowood Cooperative sent three board members, vice president Suzanne Hooper, treasurer Connie Shoemaker, and secretary Sharry DiQuinzio, straight from the afternoon site visit to their own community. Kelly Jensen, president of Paradise Village Cooperative and the ROC Association’s Mountain West director, came representing both her own co-op and the broader resident ownership network. Thistle's CEO Paul D'Angelo and ROC USA's CEO Emily Thaden were both there, alongside Asha Rao, deputy director of ROC USA Capital, a reminder that this Colorado-built pool sits inside a national push for resident ownership. Ariel Cisneros of the state's Division of Housing came too, and so did newer faces like JPMorgan Chase, Mercy Community Capital, and Momentus Capital, exactly the kind of partners we're hoping to bring into the next fund.
Part of what made July 15 feel different from a typical fundraising event was the film. We produced a short documentary on La Luna Community Cooperative's acquisition, featuring board president Mao Lee Coffee and treasurer Alberto Gonzalez telling the story in their own words. It played on a loop through the celebration, and more than one funder in the room said it was the first time they'd seen a face-to-face account of what their capital had actually done. We're posting the full film here on the blog too. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth the few minutes.
None of this happens without partners willing to put capital behind an idea that hadn't been proven yet. Thank you to CHFA, The Colorado Health Foundation, The Colorado Trust, Impact Development Fund, BWE, and NeighborWorks Capital. Each of you backed resident ownership in Colorado before the results were in, and eight communities are permanently affordable today because of it.
The pool is deployed, which means the real work starts now. Thistle and its partners are already looking at what a second fund could look like, one that keeps pace with the manufactured home communities across Colorado that may come up for sale next. If you're a funder, lender, or investor curious about what it takes to back resident ownership at this scale, or you just want to understand how a below-market capital pool like this actually gets built and deployed, we'd genuinely like to talk. It's one of the more replicable, high-impact things a funder can put capital behind Colorado right now, and there's room for more partners at the table.
Reach out to Tim Townsend, Thistle's Program Director, at ttownsendroc@thistle.us or 303-590-3272.
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