Q: The foundation puts on programs like the 11-month-long Leadership Denver program and the annual Leadership Exchange trip, which allows Denver’s business leaders to travel to and explore another city. Do you think the foundation is well known?
A: Many businesses either don’t know about us or confuse us with the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. The chamber’s mission is about economic vitality and quality of life. We are all about getting businesspeople actively engaged in civic and volunteer work.
Q: How did you end up working with the foundation?
A: I joined the Leadership Denver class of 2000, and the executive directorship of the foundation just happened to open up that fall. I had worked mostly in institutional advancement for universities and decided I wanted to broaden my horizons.
Q: What businesses would you like to see involved with the foundation?
A: The dialogue will be richer if we have people from varying industries and sectors, political perspectives, and different backgrounds and experiences.
We attract a lot of professionals whose careers are relationship-driven — bankers, financial planners, lawyers. We’d like to see more folks from architecture, engineering, bioscience, technology, construction companies and health-care providers.
Q: Do you have any success stories?
A: Rob Cohen, who founded the Metro Denver Sports Commission was a co- founder of the local Colorado I Have a Dream Foundation.
He and his wife adopted a class. From the third grade on, high-risk, low-income kids are followed until they graduate and go to college. He adopted a class, he and his wife, called the Rocky Mountain Dreamers Class.
Rob, for nine years, has been going into this class on a consistent basis to meet with his students. This young woman who went ahead of her class has gone to college. He was inspired to do this from his Leadership Denver year.
I think Leadership Denver makes a huge difference in inspiring people to get involved in the community.
Q: You sing with the Spirituals Project choir — a group sponsored by the University of Denver that performs old Negro spirituals, the religious folk songs first sung by African-American slaves — around the city. How did you get involved with the project?
A: We (the foundation) recruited the executive director of the Spirituals Project to speak to us on arts-and-culture day. I was fascinated with the idea of keeping an oral tradition of the songs sung by enslaved African-Americans alive through song and education.
I decided to join this choir as a gift to myself when my son went off to college, a little salve for the wound.
Q: Given that you are not African-American, how were you able to connect with the group?
A: The songs are so universal. They are about healing, reconciliation, hope and forgiveness. They are about conviction in your relationship with God and hope for the next life. Having grown up in Denver, many times I enter a group and already know a lot of people.
Joining the Spirituals Project was different. It meant joining a new community for me.
Q: What are you most proud of in your life now?
A: My family. My husband, David, and I have two teenagers, Andrew and Elisabeth. Everything I do links back to the family, because our children are the next generation, and the community we shape is theirs to carry on. David comes from a family of eight and I from a family of six, so the immediate and extended family are huge in our lives — literally and figuratively.
Q: What do you look forward to for 2008?
A: Witnessing my daughter turn 16, handing over the car keys, sending my son off for a year of study abroad … enjoying the new backyard patio … and learning about a whole new city for the 19th annual Leadership Exchange trip.
Edited for length and clarity by staff writer Karen Rouse.
