Tim Roberts never meant to end up as the president of the East Colfax Neighborhood Association. His path to the position began when his small press and arts space, Counterpath, was priced out of its previous downtown location by a fourfold rent increase in 2015. After searching for a new location, he landed on the much more affordable East Colfax neighborhood.

Before setting up shop, he had to check in with the Registered Neighborhood Organization (RNO). The East Colfax Neighborhood Association, one of the oldest of the 224 officially recognized neighborhood groups in the city, lacked a space of its own and had been meeting outside of the neighborhood itself. Once Counterpath was established at its new location at East 14th Avenue and Tamarac Street, Roberts offered the space to the organization and began attending meetings.

While Roberts, a 2013 Westword MasterMind, was happy to provide a space to the community, he immediately noticed that the conversations skewed toward a certain population of East Colfax. “They didn’t really almost ever target renters’ typical issues — renters’ rights, things of that nature,” he says. “There was almost never a reference to the fact that the level of people who are at risk of displacement in the neighborhood is at 70 percent. And almost never a reference to the fact that upwards of 40 percent were listed as living in poverty [in the section of the neighborhood south of Colfax]. That was just not a topic ever, let alone the RNO mobilizing to actually do something about it and to protect those populations. That was like another universe; somebody else does that stuff.”

Roberts was elected president of the RNO at the beginning of 2019. Under his leadership, the East Colfax Neighborhood Association did away with membership fees and started knocking on the doors of residents who hadn’t historically participated in the group. It put together pay-what-you-can block parties that featured food from immigrant-owned restaurants. It funded a food bank at Counterpath, open for two hours every week. At its October meeting, the organization voted unanimously on a resolution declaring that preventing involuntary displacement was its number-one priority.

While RNOs have long been a powerful fixture of local politics, often viewed (though sometimes ignored) by the city and politicians as the voice of their neighborhoods, they have a reputation for representing only a certain slice of the city. It’s the slice that has the time and resources to make it to hours-long evening meetings and write public comments about zoning proposals and liquor licenses to be presented at city council hearings. A slice that is older, wealthier and whiter than the general population.

“RNOs were founded by property owners in almost 100 percent of cases and have been run by them and taken root and exist to this day as an outgrowth of that particular community,” Roberts says. He wants to see that change citywide, envisioning RNOs not as councils of landowners protecting their interests, but as grassroots organizations that provide a platform for the organization and representation of the neighborhood’s most vulnerable voices.

The result, he hopes, could amplify grassroots politics. The proposal he’s putting forth to change the ordinance governing RNOs, however, could prove plenty controversial.

Roberts and the East Colfax Neighborhood Association seek to accomplish two things with their proposed ordinance change, which is currently in draft form. They want to ensure that the city commits resources to RNOs and that the voting membership of RNOs is representative of the population they claim to speak for.

Neighborhood organizations in Denver started popping up in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s and ’70s, they became much more widespread.

Michael Henry became involved in his neighborhood association, Capitol Hill United Neighbors (CHUN), in the early ’70s. CHUN had been established in 1969, when Capitol Hill residents teamed up to successfully fight the city’s proposal to turn 11th and 12th avenues into one-way major thoroughfares.

In Henry’s memory, “After that victory, Capitol Hill neighbors looked at each other and said, ‘Boy, that was fun, we ought to do that again and get some more organizations together and communicate effectively with city government before they decide to do something.’”

As neighbors all over the city coalesced into groups fighting similar battles, Henry helped create the Denver Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation, which brought multiple neighborhood associations to work together on citywide issues and policies. Denver INC still stands today as a powerful citizen group, representing 100 RNOs across the city.

Denver INC worked with city council members to push through an ordinance that established a system for registering neighborhood organizations and requiring the city to notify them about certain projects going on in their neighborhoods. The ordinance passed in 1979 and has not been modified much since. Giving RNOs official recognition in the eyes of the city had a profound influence on Denver politics, Henry says.

The current ordinance gives RNOs a large degree of control and the city a minimum amount of oversight or responsibility. An RNO is defined as “a voluntary group of individual residents and owners of real property, including businesses, within a certain prescribed area of the city, and/or a coalition of such groups formed for the purpose of collectively addressing issues and interests common to and widely perceived throughout the area.” They must hold open meetings a minimum of once every year, with a minimum attendance of twelve people.