Civic muscle is easy to find in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where residents often step up to address issues such as sustainability, equity, and neighborhood quality. A 2021 All-America City, Wheat Ridge was inducted into the AAC Hall of Fame in 2024, largely because of resident-led initiatives like Wheat Ridge for Equity and Localworks.
The death of George Floyd in 2020 sparked an extensive conversation in Wheat Ridge focused on systemic racism. Wheat Ridge community members created an organization called Wheat Ridge for Equity and began demonstrating six days a week to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Wheat Ridge for Equity members asked the city to begin ongoing equity training for all city staff and to create an equity task force to review all city departments and policies for racism and bigotry.
In September 2020, the City Council directed staff to implement the suggested actions, and city management scheduled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training for all city staff and the City Council. In addition, the city hosted two virtual public conversations in the summer and fall and adopted a resolution condemning racism.
Wheat Ridge for Equity continues as an organization today, advocating for “marginalized groups—LGBTQ+, BIPOC, immigrants, and more—to create a truly inclusive community.” The group organizes marches and other events in Wheat Ridge and beyond. As Terry Gale, Co-Chair for the Wheat Ridge Race and Equity Task Force in 2021, said to the AAC jury, “Wheat Ridge is all about having tough conversations, creating space for all voices, and taking meaningful actions. We are making Wheat Ridge a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient community.”
Localworks was founded in 2005 as a group of residents and businesses whose mission is “to advance Wheat Ridge as a vibrant and sustainable community.” Among the programs supported by the group is a food bank, a seven-week leadership academy, and a Block Party Library, a collection of equipment that residents can borrow for block parties and other neighborhood events, including yard games, electronic equipment, inflatables, and more.
Localworks also sponsors and promotes activities in support of Sustainable Wheat Ridge, a resident-led advisory committee assembled in 2018 that created an action plan to make the city more sustainable. The committee has worked with the local utility company to fund home energy audits and with the Regional Air Quality Council to provide rebates for electric lawnmowers. A Sustainable Neighborhood Network was also formed to convene neighborhood residents to implement sustainability programming tailored to their needs and interests.
Wheat Ridge residents told the All-America Cities jury in 2021 that they recognized that, at one time, Wheat Ridge was not seen as a welcoming city, so they had to “adapt and embrace change, to become more resilient and inclusive.” A citizen activist, turned council member, Rachel Hultin, said, “From grass roots to city hall, we do things together in Wheat Ridge. We needed to disrupt the entrenched civic voices to include people with a diversity of lived experiences to better represent the actual diversity of our city.”
In 2015, Hultin and other residents created a neighborhood leadership program, the Wheaties Academy, to “build the bench of community leaders and to ensure that the diversity of engaged civic voices reflected the actual diversity of the city. This program evolved into Wheat Ridge 101 and 102, leadership academies which are now hosted by Localworks.
Some of the city’s resident leadership and civic engagement efforts stem from outreach efforts in response to economic decline in the early 2000s. At the time, Wheat Ridge began work on a Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy, laying the groundwork for a thriving community with robust housing and bustling commercial centers. However, by 2018, as Wheat Ridge witnessed noticeable shifts and tension arose between its historic roots as a quirky small town and the need to embrace progress, the city began a new planning effort, starting with a community listening process called “Let’s Talk Resident Engagement Program.”
Structured around 10 neighborhoods, the Let’s Talk program conducted engagement blitzes over 4–5 months within a 3-year cycle, leading to budget reallocations and new work plans. Based on these changes, the city completed new action items, but soon discovered the need for new funding to pay for infrastructure enhancements like improved sidewalk connectivity to the expansion of bike lanes. The Let’s Talk process was used to inform a ballot question to extend the .5 cent sales tax to fund critical infrastructure projects, which was adopted by voters with overwhelming support, with 70% of voters in favor.
More recently, the city has created several other civic engagement programs, including What’s Up Wheat Ridge, to enhance online community engagement, and Wheat Ridge Speaks to provide official public comment on city council and planning commission items. Wheat Ridge Speaks hosted 54 meetings on the platform in 2020, and 166 comments were submitted with 5,528 website visits.
This combination of resident-led initiatives and open civic engagement has led to a thriving economy in Wheat Ridge, along with improved neighborhood quality, making the town a more inclusive, sustainable place where residents feel a strong sense of belonging. As a member of the city’s delegation told the AAC jury in 2021, “working together, Wheat Ridge strives to be a city where every community member is the key to opening more doors to being a more welcoming, more resilient, and more inclusive, while staying uniquely Wheat Ridge.”
Doug Linkhart is the President of the National Civic League.
