From “mine” to “ours”: a community-led response to veteran homelessness
Few communities have a deeper commitment to veterans than Colorado Springs, which is home to five major military installations. Veterans aren't a faceless population here; they're neighbors, family members, a defining part of who this community is. That commitment shows up in the number of organizations dedicated to serving veterans experiencing homelessness, and in the quality of work they do.
But for years, this work was done in isolation, and progress stalled. It became clear that effort alone wasn’t enough to solve the problem. What the community needed was alignment, including a shared understanding of the problem and the infrastructure to solve it together.
In response to this need, ChangeLine (then Community Health Partnership) launched the Veterans Improvement Team in December 2022. This monthly convening of local partners was built around the goal of reducing the number of actively homeless veterans in El Paso County by 50% by 2027. The effort was grounded in the Built for Zero framework and its population-specific approach: the idea that homelessness can be made rare, brief, and nonrecurring for one population at a time, when a community commits to the work with focus and consistency.
Rooted in relationships
For ChangeLine, convening the Veterans Improvement Team wasn’t just about putting people in the same room. It was about creating the conditions for relationships and trust to develop between organizations and individuals who were accustomed to going it alone much of the time.
Building this relational foundation meant sitting with discomfort. The early meetings surfaced tensions that had existed in the community for years: agencies competing for the same funding pool, duplication of efforts, and siloed work that had made it difficult to move things forward.
With support from ChangeLine, they worked through those tensions, but it didn't happen quickly. Building trust across organizations with complicated histories takes time and consistency: showing up month after month, incorporating feedback, and creating enough safety for people to bring their real challenges to the table. Through this process, they gradually formed a trusted network that allowed them to identify and work collaboratively through challenges.
Heather Brinker, ChangeLine's Coordinated Entry Manager, brought one such challenge to the group. While comparing the Coordinated Entry By-Name List with the Built for Zero report, she discovered that approximately 70 to 80 people who had identified themselves as veterans had not registered with or accessed any veteran-specific service providers.
A year earlier, that finding might have gone nowhere, but now there was a group of people who could respond to it together. After discovering that many of these veterans were staying in emergency shelters, the team realized that a more focused effort was needed to locate and connect these individuals with veteran service agencies that could provide specialized support and resources.
The result was that case conferencing, the weekly meeting where agencies coordinate on individual veterans, was restructured around accountability. With support from ChangeLine staff, meetings moved to a name-by-name format. For every veteran on the list, the questions were the same: who's been in contact with them and what happens next? Keeping data current became a priority. Follow-through became an expectation.
This restructuring didn’t just improve the process; it also broke down silos and changed how people approached the work. As Heather put it, “The conversation was no longer about ‘your client’ or ‘my client.’ It was about ‘our client.’”
Creating change together
For the last three years, that shift in mentality—from “mine” to “ours”—has been taking root. It sprouted last fall when the Veterans Improvement Team organized a coordinated street outreach day. Twenty-five providers participated, organizations that in years prior had rarely operated in the same space at the same time.
"I don't know that we would have seen all those same agencies together, trying to do something like this, three years ago," said Angela Roberts, ChangeLine’s Transformation Manager for Homelessness Initiatives. “I believe that (building those relationships) is one of the most important things they’ve done.”
This collaborative, relationship-centered approach has helped create real, measurable change for local veterans. As of April 2026, the number of actively homeless veterans has fallen from 369 to 174 since the team was launched in 2022. This decrease of 53% surpasses their goal of 50% almost a year ahead of schedule.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. For the first time, veteran-serving agencies in Colorado Springs have more permanent supportive housing slots available than veterans on the list to fill them. Permanent supportive housing is designed for those experiencing chronic homelessness, and fewer veterans are reaching that threshold—a sign that the community is intervening earlier, before the situation becomes more entrenched.
This momentum is encouraging but the work isn’t done. Functional zero—the point at which the active veteran population is consistently smaller than the community's monthly housing capacity—is still ahead. However, with more veterans leaving the system each month than entering it, it’s clear that the community has built the foundation to get there.
Progress in work like this rarely announces itself. It shows up in a conversation where something finally shifts, or in a community that tries something and, even if it doesn’t work, comes back to try again. It's hard and often messy, which is exactly why it can't be done alone. Real change happens when a community decides to own it together, for as long as it takes.