Denver's Road Home

creative / photography

The city’s groundbreaking initiative to end homelessness with an innovative effort combining housing and support programs with unprecedented public engagement.

NEED

To be successful, the City needed to engage the metro-wide community in the initiative and win their support to fund the effort with public and private funding. The barrier to achieving this was our belief that the public’s view of homelessness is defined by those they see most often—typically a single man ‘flying a sign’ at a busy intersection. To overcome this misperception and get the community engaged with the solution, Denver’s Road Home first needed to create empathy and understanding of who’s really homeless in Denver.

APPROACH

I devised, planned and fully executed “The Face of Homelessness,” a photo essay of 20 individuals and families statistically representative of the broader homeless community. The essay enabled the broader community see that while there are in fact some homeless who are single males, they also saw that over 60% are families and women with children. The photo essay was a foundational communications element of the Denver’s Road Home website, executed as a traveling exhibit shown widely around Denver, showcased at Denver International Airport during the 2008 Democratic National Convention and is still used today in marketing communications.