With the support of this grant, considerable progress was made in the organizing of tenants around issues in their apartment buildings and beyond. At the beginning of the grant period, many of the tenant associations that the coalition had worked with had gone almost entirely dormant, this was due to a lack of capacity and a lack of funding to host regular meetings with tenants and engage in strategizing around tenant issues in their buildings as well as at the city level. The funding from this made it possible for us to reignite engagement with the tenant leaders.

The first major milestone came in July when Mayor Johnston and Councilmember Watson reached out to schedule a meeting with the Longview Tenant Association (LTA) to discuss a proposal to the city council that would change the zoning of their mobile home park in order to preserve the park as a residential property. This is a direct response to organize done by the LTA to make the Denver mobile home development moratorium permanent. This meeting reignited the energy among the LTA tenant leaders, who soon after worked alongside GES on a continuing legal battle to obtain the titles of several mobile home owners who paid off their homes to the previous park owner but who never gave them the title to the homes.

GES met with tenant leaders and Justice for the People Law Center over the course of several months to organize around this issue, culminating in an initiative to take legal action against the mobile home owner in which JFP will partner with another law firm to represent tenants. Following the meeting with Councilmember Watson, tenants also made plans to testify in favor of the proposed rezoning when it was brought to council in October. GES met with tenants and worked together to prepare testimony which was then shared to council. At the Vina Apartments, tenants were re-engaged following an incident in August when a tenant who was out of the country for a month returned to find out that a maintenance worker employed by Vina had been using his truck without his consent. The tenant had left the keys to his truck in his apartment, meaning that the maintenance employee had to have broken into this tenants apartment and stolen the keys in order to use the truck. This tenant brought his concerns to the management who brushed him off and ignored him.

Tenant leaders met with GES Coalition over several meetings to discuss this issue, along with others, such as broken entryways and insufficient trash collection. In these meetings, tenant leaders and GESC worked to develop an outreach and pressure strategy and in September held a demonstration and delivered a demand leader with support from neighborhood leaders from outside of the Vina apartments demanding that the issues around the doors and trash be repaired as well as demanding consequences for the violation of the tenants personal property.

Shortly after this demonstration, it was announced that Columbia Ventures, the owners of the Vina Apartments, were firing Syringa Property Management and bringing in a new management company. Tenants view this as a major victory, especially because the Syringa staff had engaged in intimidation of tenants for organizing and even retaliated against one of our tenant leaders by threatening evicition. While it is not a guarantee that a new property management company will be better than Syringa, it does provide an opportunity to establish a rapport between the new management and the Vina Tenants Association that could be more favorable to tenants overall.

Over the course of this period GESC and tenant leaders have also been engaged in a campaign to improve the Rental Registry system in Denver to better serve tenant needs and hold landlords who are violating safety standards accountable. We have participated in this campaign alongside our partners at the Tenant Power Assembly which is composed of East Colfax Community Collective, Justice for the People Law Center and Denver Metro Tenants Union among other allies. On the heels of all of this work, we have entered into a new phase of our project which is more focused on developing the unified strength of tenants across the three neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea through a GES-wide tenant union.

While before we were engaged in struggles more focused at the individual property level, we are now beginning to bring tenants together to develop the neighborhood wide organizing further. Just in the last week of October we held an introductory organizing training for our tenant leaders which is the first in a series of trainings we will facilitate for tenant leaders.

At this training, tenant leaders also mapped out the areas of focus for outreach across the three neighborhoods as a part of our outreach strategy which we will begin implementing in the coming months. We have not yet had success in creating a logo and gear for the tenant union as we have struggled to find a graphic design artist that fits our criteria and has the capacity to take on the work but we plan on reaching out to design agencies who offer discounted rates to non-profits as we have not yet explored that option. In addition, we have not had as much activity in the Elisabetta Tenants Association, due to low capacity from tenant leaders, but as we develop the outreach strategy to focus on neighborhood-wide tenant organizing we intend to re-engage with the Elisabetta and speak to new tenants.