When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, that vulnerability became impossible to ignore. Existing relief systems weren’t built to reach the businesses that needed them most. PPP funding — though substantial nationally — was structured in ways that left sole proprietors and small businesses behind. Women-owned, BIPOC-owned, veteran-owned, and rural businesses were falling through the gaps. The nearly half-billion-dollar funding gap for underserved entrepreneurs in Colorado wasn’t new. The pandemic just made it impossible to ignore.
Launching Energize Colorado in March 2020
The engine that got Energize Colorado moving was legislation. Colorado’s governor and legislators made a decisive choice: take CARES Act dollars and deploy them directly to small businesses as grants and loans — no red tape, no stringent qualification criteria. They designated roughly $40 million for that purpose, deploying up to $15,000 in grants and $20,000 in loans to businesses that PPP would never have reached.
In March 2020, I co-founded Energize Colorado alongside Brad Feld, Marc Nager, Erik Mitisek, Abram Sloss, and Eric Drummond — mobilizing leaders from across Colorado’s private, public, nonprofit, and academic communities. Any state could have done what we did. Every state received CARES Act money. What made Colorado different was that our governor and legislators chose to give it directly to small businesses — and then we built the infrastructure to ensure it reached the businesses it was meant to serve.
The strategy was straightforward: save our small businesses. Build resilience through technical assistance and grants first, then loans. Prioritize the businesses that had been systematically underserved.
What made the approach different wasn’t just the capital — it was how we delivered it. An extensive volunteer network of over 600 Coloradans, uniquely embodying the state’s “Give First” mentality, helped businesses navigate the application process. Partnerships with Colorado’s CDFIs, Regional Loan Funds, and community lenders ensured funds reached businesses that traditionally struggled to access capital. With the strict timelines from the US Treasury department surrounding the Cares Act funding, we had to listen, learn, and quickly light up the generosity and connectivity already present across our volunteer and small business communities statewide.
The Brookings Institution took note, publishing “Overcoming Bias in Small Business Relief in Colorado” as a national example of what equitable capital deployment could look like.
Big Impact
By Energize Colorado’s first anniversary in March 2021, the Gap Fund had deployed $26 million to more than 2,000 businesses across Colorado — 97% of which belonged to underserved communities. Of that, 80% of recipients were women-owned entities, 37% were rural, 24% were Latino- or Hispanic-owned, and 16% were Black-owned.
By April 2023, when I transitioned from CEO to Chair, Energize Colorado had deployed $45 million in grant and loan capital to more than 5,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs across the state. Rise of the Rest highlighted the model as a national blueprint for replication. Kaiser Permanente contributed $1 million to the Gap Fund. And the Energize Community Program launched — bringing funding readiness, business advising, and community cohort programming to underserved corridors in Pueblo, Southwest Denver, and East Colfax.
In 2025, Energize Colorado achieved certification as a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI).
Many Hands, Light Work
What Energize Colorado revealed is that the gap between available capital and the people who need it most is rarely about money. It’s about trust, access, and the connective tissue that helps underserved entrepreneurs find their way to resources that were supposedly designed for them.
Building that connective tissue — through volunteers, through community lenders, through outreach that met people where they were — turned out to be the strategy. Not the fund itself, but the ecosystem of support built around it.
Colorado’s small businesses employ approximately 1.1 million people — nearly half the state’s entire private workforce. Energize Colorado was built on the conviction that those businesses, and the people behind them, deserved the same fighting chance as anyone else.