Introduction

Every Coloradan deserves the opportunity to build wealth and achieve economic mobility. Yet for many, a lack of access to low-cost credit and asset-building tools limits their ability to achieve these goals. Colorado has taken steps to address resource gaps, but challenges remain. 

At the local level, community organizations have created their own low-cost credit and asset-building programs. This report highlights some of these local efforts and examines ways to expand and scale their practices using existing statewide infrastructure. By learning from these community initiatives, we can build a state where every Coloradan has an opportunity to thrive.

Backdrop: Wealth Inequality, Debt, and High-Cost Credit

Wealth disparities in the U.S. are growing. In 2022, white households held an average of $1.4 million in wealth — six times more than Black and Hispanic families. We see similar trends in Colorado.

While many factors contribute to wealth inequities, unequal access to financial tools such as affordable credit and asset-building opportunities play a role. Individuals with either poor or no credit history, or who have few assets, are less likely to qualify for traditional, low-cost loan products. Lacking affordable options, when these individuals have to take out credit, it often comes with higher interest rates and fees. These factors make it more likely that people will miss loan payments. This, in turn, can lead to additional late fees and damage to one’s credit score. Households are then left with tough choices: to pay their rent, mortgage, or minimum payments on existing debt. Under pressure to repay larger amounts, they may take on more debt, creating a cycle that’s hard to break. 

Importantly, research shows that debt and credit challenges disproportionately impact communities of color, immigrants, and rural residents. For example, in Colorado, those from communities of color have twice as much debt in collections and higher delinquency rates for auto and credit card loans compared to white communities. These statistics have long-term implications for wealth building, as cycles of debt can impact one’s ability to accumulate assets, like a home. Notably, Black and Hispanic households face higher credit denial rates and lower homeownership rates.

Growing Concerns About Emerging Risky Financial Products and Regulatory Issues

Alongside the systemic challenges outlined above, individuals with no or poor credit are increasingly being targeted by relatively unregulated credit products, such as Buy Now, Pay Later and Earned Wage Access. Many of these products come with hidden fees, poor transparency, and little consumer protection. 

The rise of new, unregulated credit products coincides with a weakening of federal oversight, as efforts are underway to strip power from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has played a crucial role in regulating harmful financial practices.

These emerging challenges heighten the need to support meaningful credit and asset-building strategies that provide people with opportunities to grow their financial well-being.

Financial Empowerment & the Role of Community-Based Models

State policymakers have taken steps to support Coloradans’ financial well-being and reduce cycles of debt. Some efforts have focused on limiting predatory practices, such as capping interest rates on payday loans, while others have emphasized proactive financial empowerment strategies that help residents build credit and assets before they need to turn to costly lending options.

Financial empowerment takes a holistic approach to financial well-being and prioritizes long-term wealth building and systemic solutions. Examples include improving access to safe and affordable banking products, supporting financial coaching, expanding consumer protections, and increasing access to capital.

To coordinate financial empowerment efforts across Colorado, the state legislature created the Office of Financial Empowerment (OFE) in 2021. Housed within the Attorney General’s Office, the OFE advances statewide strategies to grow assets and reduce reliance on high-cost lending. Denver, Pueblo, and the Roaring Fork Valley have also established their own local financial empowerment centers.

A key part of the state OFE’s mission is supporting local financial empowerment work. This recognizes that local leaders are often best equipped to identify community priorities, create culturally relevant programs, and build the trust necessary for residents to participate. Colorado already has strong, community-led initiatives that are making a difference in their areas. With targeted technical assistance, funding, and policy support from the OFE, these local strategies can expand their impact while staying true to the community-driven approach that makes them effective.

Community-Engaged Research Approach

With support from the Gill Foundation, the Bell Policy Center launched a community-engaged research initiative to identify and elevate promising financial empowerment models that could be supported and scaled through state infrastructure like the OFE. Our research process involved in-depth conversations with financial empowerment practitioners, community-based organizations, and nonprofit leaders across Colorado.

Across conversations, several recurring themes emerged. Partners consistently emphasized the importance of trust and cultural responsiveness as the foundation for engagement and sustained participation. Many noted that financial empowerment is most effective when integrated with wraparound services, such as housing support, rental assistance, and workforce development. Partners also pointed to persistent infrastructure and awareness gaps — including digital, language, and outreach barriers — that limit access to available resources. Sustainable funding and a reduction in administrative burdens were highlighted as critical to maintaining program continuity, and many stressed the need for better alignment with policy frameworks so that promising local models can scale beyond small pilot programs.

To better elucidate the cross-cutting themes described above, we chose to highlight three community organizations that are engaged in financial empowerment activities aimed at increasing access to low-cost credit and/or building assets. Each of the three programs responds directly to community-defined needs, serves historically excluded populations in ways mainstream systems do not, and demonstrates clear potential for replication or expansion with supportive policy and resources. The following sections profile Neighbor to Neighbor’s positive rent reporting and housing support programs, Rocky Mountain Prosperity Project’s culturally grounded lending circles, and the Center for Community Wealth Building’s real estate cooperative academy — three examples where local innovation, paired with state-level support, can expand financial access and build wealth across Colorado.

Promising Practices to Model

Positive Rent Reporting for Credit Building Paired with Housing Support Programs

Across Colorado, affordable housing providers such as Neighbor to Neighbor (N2N), which is located in northern Colorado, are increasingly incorporating positive rent reporting into their financial empowerment work. Positive rent reporting only reports on-time rental payments to the major credit bureaus. Historically, on-time rental payments have not been factored into credit scores, limiting renters’ ability to establish and grow their credit. When embedded in housing support programs, such as public and affordable housing, positive rent reporting opens the door to safer financial products and homeownership opportunities.

There has already been some statewide action to advance positive rent reporting. For example, the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA) ran a Rent Reporting for Credit Pilot Program, in which N2N participated, from 2021 to 2024. The results were promising. Tenants who took part saw an average 62-point boost in their credit scores, with over half moving into a higher credit score band. Colorado has since expanded this effort, providing free rent reporting through a partnership with Esusu, a rent-reporting platform, to up to 20,000 tenants in CHFA-supported housing.

Colorado’s findings mirror those from a first-ever randomized controlled trial conducted by the Urban Institute. Researchers found that positive rent reporting significantly increased the share of people with near-prime credit scores (defined as credit scores between 620 and 659) or better by 25 percentage points, particularly for renters without prior credit histories. However, research and practitioner experience show that rent reporting is not risk-free and must be implemented thoughtfully to protect residents and maximize impact.

While the results of CHFA’s pilot program and Urban Institute’s study are promising, insights from N2N highlight the infrastructure and wrap-around services needed to realize rent reporting’s potential. 

N2N’s housing resources vary and include immediate financial assistance for utilities, rent, or mortgage bills to affordable housing, and a learning center for debt management and first-time homeownership. Prior to its participation in CHFA’s pilot program, N2N was already automatically enrolling its affordable housing tenants into a positive rent reporting program. N2N found that participating in CHFA’s pilot program gave the organization access to a better online tracking and reporting system along with technical assistance. As N2N notes, state resources made positive rent reporting easier and helped to minimize administrative costs previously borne by the organization. Unfortunately, however, since the pilot’s conclusion, state support has ended and N2N has had to return to using its former, more burdensome system.

Positive rent reporting is a component of a more holistic effort by N2N to increase the financial wellbeing of its affordable housing tenants. For example, the organization offers financial education opportunities, connections to other community services, as well as a fund to help residents with unexpected expenses. Staff notes that trauma-informed practices and culturally informed communication are important in building trusted relationships with clients. By operating a positive rent reporting program in conjunction with a range of other financial wellness programs, N2N stands to help clients holistically grow their financial wellbeing.

Despite N2N’s financial empowerment offerings, the organization has found that some of its clients are not yet ready to take advantage of the above-mentioned opportunities. Reasons vary, but accessibility is a challenge for many. For example, N2N notes there can be language barriers or clients may have trouble finding child care or transportation services. Additionally, there can be stigma associated with attending financial empowerment events.

For those who do reach out for assistance, N2N has found that a lack of financial coaches limits the full potential of their financial empowerment offerings. This reality highlights the need for additional resources to help Coloradans access needed financial empowerment opportunities and build on the benefits of programs like positive rent reporting. It also heightens the value of opportunities, like positive rent reporting, which require minimal staffing support.

As N2N’s work shows, with the right design and policy support, positive rent reporting integrated with other financial empowerment opportunities can expand access to safer lending options, improve financial security, and reduce racial credit disparities. 

Culturally Based Lending Circles for Small-Dollar Lending Access

Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), otherwise referred to as culturally based lending circles, offer a community-based solution to financial exclusion. This cross-cultural practice has many model variations, including the West African Susu and Mexican Tanda. These informal financial practices offer a non-institutional option for savings, credit access, and collective economic support, especially among communities historically marginalized by mainstream financial institutions.

Globally, ROSCAs are built on trust, reciprocity, and cultural values, and predate colonial banking structures. These groups are embedded in community life and circulate wealth democratically, prioritizing social well-being over profit. In the U.S., ROSCAs adapt to local immigrant and cultural contexts. A study on Tandas among Mexican Americans shows that participation supports financial and social functions, builds savings, helps individuals navigate financial systems, and supports families. 

During the COVID pandemic, scams posing as lending circles called “sou-sous” or “gifting circles” caused confusion between genuine ROSCAs and illegal pyramid schemes. Fraudulent schemes often require upfront payments and recruitment, promising high returns with little transparency. Unlike authentic lending circles based on trust and cultural exchange, these schemes are exploitative and tend to collapse, harming late joiners. This highlights the need for better public education and clearer policies to protect those who use informal financial models from predatory schemes.

In Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Prosperity Project (RMPP), which primarily serves West African immigrants in the Denver metro, has adapted the Susu model into a community-driven financial empowerment tool. Participants contribute an established amount to a collective pot. One of the Susu participants then collects the entire pot at an assigned time (ex: monthly or bi-monthly). The cycle continues until all participants have had an opportunity to collect the pot of money. For example, a Susu may have 10 participants who contribute $100 a month. Each participant then receives a pot of $1,000 at some point over the next 10 months. RMPP’s lending circles fluctuate over time, and the number of participants and monthly contributions can vary. Susu members have the ability to use the funds they collect as they see fit. They could for example use the funds to cover a financial emergency or an upcoming family vacation.

As part of RMPP’s Susu program, the member receiving the pot of money must also host a social gathering that includes financial literacy discussions or lessons. RMPP has found that this component helps to build connection and trust among members. Additionally, participants are welcome to join RMPP’s other programming, which focuses on supporting financial literacy, credit building, career development, and entrepreneurship skills. 

RMPP’s Susus promotes social cohesion, fosters a sense of commitment among participants, and provides practical experience in saving and investing. This is especially valuable as RMPP has found that investment and savings may feel abstract for some participants. For example, staff have found that some of their Susu participants won’t take advantage of a 401k match through their employers.

RMPP’s Susus are unique because its informal practices are connected to opportunities to learn about formal financial systems. Their work shows how trusted, cultural practices can act as entry points into broader financial empowerment pathways. Scalability and growth are limited by the capacity to facilitate more lending circles and related programming. Additionally, accessibility barriers, such as childcare, transportation, and translation, must be addressed. 

Community Ownership Real Estate Co-Operatives

Property ownership is widely recognized as one of the most valuable vehicles for building wealth. Community ownership is increasingly seen as an approach that can facilitate property ownership while also promoting racial and economic equity. This practice involves community members and/or organizations and businesses co-owning and managing property. 

In practice, community ownership can take many forms, from community land trusts to real estate investment cooperatives. For underrepresented communities, particularly in high-cost or rapidly gentrifying markets, commercial real estate cooperatives offer a path to retain local businesses, expand access to amenities, prevent displacement, and generate local economic activity. These models redistribute property rights, allowing individuals to hold equity or income shares while the broader community retains certain decision-making powers. Real estate cooperatives can be tailored to meet local needs. 

To advance community ownership practices, the Center for Community Wealth Building (CCWB) runs a Community Owned Real Estate (CORE) Academy.  The program helps local groups, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits — often led by or serving communities of color — acquire and manage property for the long-term benefit of their communities. Over 9–10 months, participants develop practical skills in acquisition strategy development, entity formation, raising capital, and navigating local regulations, all grounded in anti-racist principles. CORE combines peer-to-peer learning with one-on-one coaching tailored to each group’s specific context and offers flexible microgrants to cover early-stage expenses such as legal review, fundraising, or pre-development planning. To lower participation barriers, CORE provides bilingual facilitation, stipends, and childcare support. This combination of technical support, personalized guidance, and strategic funding helps turn ideas into actionable plans for property acquisition.

CORE also helps build connections with anchor institutions — large, place-based entities such as hospitals, universities, and major nonprofits that have a vested interest in the long-term well-being of their surrounding community — and mission-aligned funders. These relationships can create pathways for cooperative participants to secure tenants, buyers, or financing aligned with community priorities.

CORE’s experience reveals ongoing structural and practical barriers to real estate cooperatives. High initial capital costs and standard bank financing options, like the common 10 percent down payment for commercial acquisitions, make ownership challenging for many cooperatives. Notably, CHAFA has approved, but has not yet launched, a blanket/share loan pilot. This product would enable multiple entities to jointly finance and own a property under one loan, easing individual capital burdens.

Administrative complexity, governance capacity limits, and the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate financial education — especially for immigrant communities unfamiliar with cooperative models — also create challenges. Moreover, there are ongoing resource needs that make maintaining a cooperative challenging. These include facilitation needs to build trust and manage conflicts, as well as technical assistance to address new and ongoing issues. Finally, while CORE lowers participation barriers during the program, ongoing support for language access, childcare, and time off work for cooperative participants is crucial to promote broad and equitable involvement.

CCWB’s approach shows that with targeted technical assistance, flexible funding, and a supportive peer network, underrepresented communities can start to overcome systemic barriers to real estate ownership. Expanding and institutionalizing financing tools like CHFA’s pilot product, along with growing the capacity-building infrastructure provided by CORE Academy, would make these efforts more feasible across the state.

From Community Models to Statewide Action

The three models featured in this report show how trusted, local approaches can expand financial access and build wealth where mainstream systems fall short. Each emerged from community priorities, addresses barriers such as credit invisibility or lack of capital, and integrates cultural responsiveness with practical financial tools. Their successes also reveal shared needs: sustainable and flexible funding, technical assistance that builds local capacity, culturally and linguistically accessible outreach, and statewide coordination to share best practices and align policy. To better support and expand these practices, state policymakers should consider the following recommendations.

Rent Reporting for Credit Building

1. Integrate positive rent reporting into statewide financial empowerment programs: Rent reporting is more effective when combined with other financial empowerment opportunities. The OFE, CHFA, and affordable housing providers should cooperate to better integrate financial counseling, coaching, and rent reporting efforts. This, for example, could take the form of sharing information regarding how to connect residents with financial counseling opportunities when CHFA works with affordable housing providers to ser-up positive rent reporting efforts. 
2. Sustain and expand state-supported efforts to encourage positive rent reporting: CHFA should expand its pilot program to reach more affordable housing providers, prioritizing those which serve rural, low-income, and communities of color. Additionally, the state should provide technology support and assistance to those already offering positive rent reporting. This assistance can help defray costs and administrative burdens, which in-turn may help housing providers continue offering positive rent reporting.
3. Collect, track & build data infrastructure: CHFA should continue tracking and sharing anonymized outcomes of positive rent reporting efforts, such as credit score changes, the number of tenants moving from credit invisible to scorable, and the impacts on access to new credit products. This data should be shared with the legislature to inform oversight, funding decisions, and program improvements.

Culturally Based Lending Circles (ROSCAs)

1. Create a statewide peer learning and support network for ROSCAs: The OFE should convene a peer learning network for nonprofit and community leaders who facilitate lending circles. This could include low-cost virtual meetups, shared templates (e.g., for participant agreements or circle logistics), or a centralized online hub to promote cross-organizational learning. Such a network would help to create a shared infrastructure that helps others looking to start a ROSCA, while also surfacing implementation challenges and opportunities, and helping to inform policy and funding needs.
2. Build on existing consumer safety initiatives: In partnership with the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division and community stakeholders — including those who facilitate legitimate ROSCAs — the OFE should develop and distribute multilingual public education materials to help distinguish legitimate ROSCAs from illegal pyramid schemes.
3. Provide flexible microgrants for ROSCA facilitation and participation support: To expand access and reduce participation barriers, the OFE should offer small, flexible grants to community-based organizations like RMPP which facilitate ROSCAs. These funds could support facilitation costs, childcare, transportation, and language access efforts. These grants could mirror the OFE’s recent financial coaching grant program and support models that meet people where they are.
4. Facilitate formal asset-building opportunities: The OFE should offer resources to organizations that sponsor ROSCAs to help participants engage in formal wealth-building opportunities such as homeownership or the creation of savings or retirement accounts. This could involve developing culturally responsive workshops and coaching programs that build on the financial activities developed through lending circles in order to help participants navigate eligibility for down payment assistance or asset and credit-building products. Additionally, the OFE should develop resources to help financial coaches recognize ROSCA participation as a starting point for wealth building. 

Community Ownership Real Estate Co-operatives

1. Prioritize financing tools for cooperative real estate ownership: CHFA should prioritize the launch of its blanket/share loan pilot, which would allow multiple entities to jointly finance and own a property under a single loan. This product should be paired with technical assistance to help applicants navigate underwriting requirements, the creation of governance structures, and long-term maintenance planning. 
2. Build statewide technical assistance and peer learning infrastructure: The OFE should convene a statewide network of cooperative practitioners, community-based organizations, and participants to share templates, model governance structures, acquisition strategies, and lessons learned. This network could be supported through a centralized OFE-managed online resource hub and periodic in-person or virtual convenings. These efforts would reduce duplication, strengthen trust across communities, and help new cooperatives learn from established ones.
3. Create a flexible early-stage funding stream for cooperative acquisition readiness: The OFE should establish a microgrant program, modeled on its financial coaching grants, to help emerging cooperatives cover early-stage costs such as feasibility studies, legal formation, pre-development planning, and conflict-resolution facilitation. These funds could also be used to offset accessibility barriers, such as childcare, transportation, and translation services, enabling equitable participation in cooperative ownership preparation programs. Public funds could be matched with philanthropic dollars to maximize reach.
4. Develop culturally and linguistically responsive education on cooperative ownership: In collaboration with CCWB, anchor institutions (e.g., hospitals, universities, large nonprofits), and immigrant-serving organizations, the OFE should co-create multilingual, culturally tailored educational materials that explain cooperative ownership models, governance responsibilities, and financing pathways. This would build awareness in communities unfamiliar with formal cooperative structures and address mistrust or misconceptions that often limit participation.

Conclusion

Colorado’s growing wealth gap will not close without intentional investment in community-led solutions that expand access to safe, affordable financial tools. The models highlighted in this report show that when residents engage with trusted, culturally relevant programs they are more likely to build credit, accumulate assets, and pursue long-term financial goals.

Scaling the approaches highlighted in this report will require preserving the trust and cultural grounding that make them effective while embedding them within supportive state infrastructure. By leveraging existing state infrastructure to coordinate resources, align policy, and invest in capacity development, Colorado can connect these local successes into a cohesive, resilient financial ecosystem. In doing so, the state can move beyond isolated solutions toward an environment where every Coloradan, regardless of race, income, or geography, has the tools, protections, and opportunities needed to achieve lasting economic mobility.