A Community Landscape Approach to Address the Needs of Older Adults Experiencing Homelessness in Denver

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Our project’s goal was to center the perspectives and experiences of older adults with experiences of homelessness in Denver through qualitative interviews. Our team at the Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging (KIHA) partnered with Elevated Denver (a nonprofit that seeks to address homelessness through engaging lived experts, community members, and professionals in housing and homelessness services/policy) to: 

1. deepen understanding of their experiences with homelessness and navigating services; and 
2. identify barriers to services and potential solutions to supporting this group. 

We also collaborated with two nonprofit shelters in Denver that serve unhoused older adults to identify potential interview participants: 1) Senior Support Services, a day shelter for low-income and unhoused older adults; and 2) Sinton’s Sanctuary, a 25-bed 24/7 shelter for older unhoused women. Both shelters provided our team with private space to conduct interviews to better provide an environment that was more comfortable and familiar for interview participants. Elevated Denver hired and trained two Peer Interviewers (individuals in their sixties with lived experience of homelessness) who led all interviews with another team member present to take detailed notes. 

A total of 20 older individuals (11 women, 9 men) with current or recent experience with homelessness participated in interviews. Analysis identified several key insights: 

1) unaffordable housing costs contributed to loss of housing, despite most participants having worked most of their lives; 

2) overnight shelters, while providing necessary services, feel unsafe and often do not help individuals move forward; 

3) aging-specific homeless service organizations were supportive for enrolling in benefits and finding housing, yet needed healthcare services were difficult to access for many; and 

4) community and sense of belonging are critical, along with a willingness to ask for help. 

Based on our findings and conversations with participants and partners, meaningful inclusion of older adults who have experienced homelessness is essential for research and program/policy development to ensure relevant, appropriate services and reforms. Our findings further validate systemic failures in supporting our elders’ stability and opportunities to thrive in later life and underscore the need for homelessness and healthcare services dedicated to unhoused older adults. The project team was able to share the project findings in several settings. First, we brought our initial insights back to Senior Support Services and Sinton’s Sanctuary for feedback sessions with interview participants and additional clients to verify that our framing felt relevant to their experiences and what was important to them. Additionally, Elevated Denver published an issue brief on their website which is publicly available and has been shared directly with our community partners and various networks concerned with homelessness and/or aging in Colorado. The Board of Directors at Senior Support Services also invited our team to share project findings during a board meeting, leading to a productive brainstorming discussion about how the project can be utilized for the organization’s development and fundraising initiatives. Elevated Denver and the team at KIHA continue to brainstorm and plan ways to disseminate the project findings, including to members of Denver City Council, at academic conferences, and additional community forums.

This community collaboration proved to be beneficial to all parties. Through this project, KIHA researcher relationships were strengthened between Elevated Denver and Senior Support Services, and KIHA researchers established a positive relationship with Sinton’s Sanctuary. Further, this project connected Elevated Denver and Senior Support Services, leading to additional support and collaboration between the two organizations, including an ongoing photo narrative project Elevated Denver is leading that is featuring the photos and story of one of Senior Support Service’s clients. Both Senior Support Services and Sinton’s Sanctuary expressed finding value in the findings to better understand how they can support their clients and to have additional resources to advocate for their services and older unhoused individuals. The two graduate students working with the DU team also expressed gratitude for the opportunity to work on a meaningful project. Perhaps most importantly, most of the interview participants explicitly expressed their appreciation of being able to participate in an interview and shared that the ability to tell their stories was a valuable experience for them. One participant shared in their interview, “I feel such a relief knowing that there are people involved, people that care.” 

The project has had tremendous positive impact on Dr. Chess’s team and their public perception, particularly on his postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Pilar Ingle who served as a leader and co-investigator for the project and community partnerships. The project, and more importantly, the deepening of community partner relationships, has increased Dr. Ingle’s visibility in the Denver community as an academic dedicated to issues of aging and homelessness. Dr. Ingle was recently interviewed in a 9News documentary about her work on end-of-life and homelessness—this led to the opportunity for the current project team at Elevated Denver and DU to be filmed and featured for this documentary, which will be released later this year. She was also recently invited to serve on a community panel alongside other Denver-based housing and homelessness advocates for an event focusing on older adults experiencing homelessness (hosted by the Delores Project). The Public Good project has already led to opportunities for our team to present at academic conferences, and academic manuscripts are in process (see below), and has expanded the work of Dr. Chess’s team surrounding financial wellbeing of older adults. 

Our project was presented at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting in Boston, MA this November as part of a session focused on community-engaged research. Elevated Denver recently published an Issue Brief describing the project and its findings and implications, available on their website at https://elevateddenver.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Elevated-Denver_Older-Adults_CommunityLandscape-Addendum.pdf Additionally, we are in the process of developing two manuscripts from the project, which we will write in partnership with Elevated Denver.