A note from Amber: Making room for a stronger response

Written by Amber Ptak, ChangeLine CEO

Since February 2018, ChangeLine (formerly Community Health Partnership) has been honored to serve as the lead agency for all four of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) required lead functions for the Pikes Peak Continuum of Care (PPCoC): Collaborative Applicant, Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), Coordinated Entry Lead, and Planning/Administrative Lead. 

The PPCoC is a network of more than 100 organizations and individuals working to prevent and end homelessness in our region. It’s been a meaningful part of our journey, and I’m deeply proud of what our team and the community have accomplished together for more than eight years. However, over the coming year, our team will begin to shift the HUD-funded administrative responsibilities out of ChangeLine. 

This is a significant step, but it’s not a sudden one. In 2023, ChangeLine began a carefully sequenced, two-and-a-half year transition process—now entering its final year—that would allow the PPCoC to develop a new infrastructure better suited for that work while ensuring a smooth and stable handoff. It is not an exit or an abandonment; it is an evolution full of possibilities to get this right for the people who need us most. 

Several years into our role as the lead agency for all four HUD-mandated administrative roles, ChangeLine began to recognize that the PPCoC’s compliance and operational infrastructure required a different kind of backbone than what ChangeLine was built to provide. That’s because the PPCoC and ChangeLine play different but complementary roles in addressing homelessness. 

The PPCoC’s role is to coordinate the region’s housing and service response to homelessness, aligning federal funding, managing data systems, and ensuring providers can meet immediate needs. ChangeLine’s role is to help the community look upstream and ask the harder questions to drive systemic change: 

• What systems, narratives, and decisions keep people one crisis away from losing everything?

• Who benefits - intentionally or not - from the way things are structured now? 

• What would it look like to design a community where stability and belonging aren’t privileges, but guarantees? 

• How will we lead differently so that every person can live with dignity, connection, and possibility? 

The PPCoC focuses on the essential, compliance-driven work of housing and service coordination. ChangeLine focuses on changing systems - building trust, relationships, and shared leadership that prevent people from falling through the cracks in the first place. Both roles are essential, and both are strengthened when they can operate in their lanes with alignment, partnership, and mutual respect. In doing so, we’ll create something stronger: a coordinated, sustainable system that responds effectively to immediate needs, while others tackle the deeper conditions that cause them.

We’ve learned that one agency can’t and shouldn’t do it all. This work takes an ecosystem - people with lived experience, government, nonprofits, funders, and community members - each playing a distinct role to prevent and end homelessness. The PPCoC structure was built decades ago for a different time and a different landscape. Every city in America does this differently because communities themselves are different. What matters most is that we stay open to possibility and a different way of working together. 

Through private fundraising, community partnerships, and the dedication of our incredible staff, ChangeLine spent the past 24 months preparing the PPCoC’s leadership for long-term sustainability. To support this process, we hired consultants with national and local expertise focused specifically on guiding this transition. Together with the PPCoC board, we strengthened governance structures, clarified decision-making processes, and expanded engagement from providers and people with lived experience of homelessness. This work has created a solid foundation for what comes next, ensuring the PPCoC is well positioned for a successful transition and long-term success.

The progress we’ve made so far is a reflection of the dedicated people doing this work. I’m incredibly proud of ChangeLine’s Homeless Initiatives team who, even during this time of transition, show up with their whole hearts every single day. Their commitment to our unhoused neighbors and those who serve them is inspiring. Their ability to elevate the voices of those with lived experience, to bring diverse people to the table, to create conversation, and to build community gives me hope that our local leaders can lead with the same courage and vision needed to develop a new structure that allows the PPCoC to thrive. 

With the groundwork now laid, the process has entered the stage of identifying a new structure for the HUD-funded administrative functions for the PPCoC. As of this writing, the PPCoC Board is beginning conversations with interested organizations and will move into a formal request for proposals later this year. ChangeLine’s team will continue to walk alongside this important work, helping to ensure a smooth handoff, supporting the transition team, and staying committed to the community’s broader strategy to end homelessness. 

And ChangeLine will go further. Our next phase is about changing the conditions that drive people into crisis in the first place - through civic engagement, systems transformation, and leadership development. We will keep asking bold questions, convening unlikely partners, and help our region design solutions that are just, connected, and lasting.  ChangeLine was never built to play small. We were built to help this community do hard things, together.

Now is the time for courage and collaboration, not competition. Now is the time to strengthen the ecosystem working to end homelessness. Now is the time to recognize that real change takes every kind of leader: those who manage the systems and those who dare to redesign them. 

We invite our city leaders, partners, and community members to join us in this next chapter by moving toward a community where everyone has a place to belong, and a life worth living. We invite all those who believe that change is possible to have a seat at our table. I have every confidence that, together, we are building a foundation strong enough to create lasting change. 

Ending homelessness requires all of us - visionaries, implementers, disruptors, and bridge builders. It also requires us to rise above the noise. We can’t afford division when lives are at stake. If we truly believe change is possible, then we owe it to each other - and to our unhoused neighbors - to lead with respect, generosity, and courage.

The work ahead demands nothing less.