Steamboat for All
Steamboat For All works to convene community partners and organizations through grounded community action to facilitate meaningful change around housing and childcare affordability.
Steamboat Springs, Colorado
Steamboat Springs, Colorado
Most efforts to fix a community’s affordability crisis start with an organization. Someone builds a coalition, hires staff, writes a strategic plan. The dashboard comes later, if it comes at all. In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the work happened in reverse.
Several years ago, Finding Common Purpose (FCP) identified Steamboat Springs as a community where the gap between wages and the cost of living was hollowing out the workforce. Housing and childcare costs were pushing out the 25-to-45-year-olds the community’s working class depends on — teachers, nurses, tradespeople, young families. The trend was visible to anyone paying attention, but there was no shared, public accounting of what was actually happening.
FCP funded the creation of an affordability dashboard: a public-facing tool that quantified the problem in terms any resident, council member, or local employer could understand. It tracked deed-restricted housing units, the share of income going to rent and childcare, and demographic trends that signaled whether Steamboat was becoming more or less livable for working residents.
That shared understanding, driven by the dashboard’s existence, led to the creation of Steamboat for All (SfA), an organization dedicated to housing and childcare affordability in the Yampa Valley. SfA convenes community partners, translates data into policy advocacy, and works toward a measurable goal: keeping Steamboat accessible to the people who make it function.
As SfA developed its plan for how the work would drive change, FCP worked alongside the team, offering structured feedback, connecting them to national leaders working on similar challenges, and helping SfA build its approach around FCP’s Six Practices model. The goal was to support SfA through connection to best practices, learnings, and a tested model as it worked to achieve its mission..
FCP also supported Storytellers for Change, an effort to put faces to the dashboard’s data — first-person accounts from residents who could say what the numbers meant in practice.
The Steamboat work reflects a specific idea about how change happens: data creates shared reality, shared reality creates alignment, and alignment creates the conditions for durable institutional action.
By starting with the dashboard rather than the organization, FCP helped compress a process that typically takes years. Steamboat for All didn’t have to spend its early years convincing people a problem existed. The evidence was already public, already trusted, already shaping conversations.
In most communities, an intermediary comes first and the data infrastructure follows. In Steamboat, the data came first, and the organization grew from it. It’s a model for how FCP’s partnerships can help an organization and community thrive.
“Steamboat For All is helping create systemic change in a community that is at risk of losing its character and economic vitality if the people who power Steamboat can’t live and thrive here. “Under the guidance of Finding Common Purpose, in our first six months, Steamboat For All has been able to support meaningful change by convening critical partners, shining a spotlight on the real people impacted by affordability and filling capacity gaps of the organizations doing the critical work on the ground.”
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