Gunnison Valley, Colorado | One Valley Resilience Roadmap

The Gunnison Valley is a high mountain valley made up of beautiful landscapes, vibrant small towns, and an increasingly diverse populace. Despite this, the region faced challenges, including high cost of living and lack of jobs, in the post pandemic era. This inspired the Gunnison Valley to participate in the Colorado COVID-19 Regional Resiliency and Recovery Roadmaps Program, a federal program administered by the State of Colorado. Community Builders was hired to facilitate the project at the local level.

The One Valley Resilience Roadmap (OVRR) brought together Gunnison County, the City of Gunnison, and The Towns of Crested Butte and Mount Crested Butte  to address shared regional challenges that no one jurisdiction could address on their own, including but not limited to housing affordability, transportation and infrastructure planning, and equity and inclusion. OVRR built upon successes and challenges identified in the 2016 One Valley Prosperity Project, also facilitated by Community Builders, as well as several pre-existing comprehensive plans of participating communities.

OVRR engaged more than 60 stakeholders and subject matter experts over a 12-month period to provide direction, develop goals and strategies, and set priorities. The project’s working group came together to clarify what is most important to their communities by discussing what the region sees as top challenges, needs, concerns, and priorities that require regional collaboration to address effectively.

Stakeholder groups for each of the three key focus areas – housing; land use, infrastructure and transportation and civic capacity – convened to collaboratively identify goals for the future and high-level strategies to provide vision and direction. Action Planning Teams convened numerous times to further develop and refine specific strategies for each of the three key focus areas.

One Valley Resiliency Roadmap served as the project’s culminating plan. The roadmap captured a unified approach to strengthen the region, resulting in a regional housing strategy to address the Gunnison Valley’s housing needs, a land use and transportation framework to facilitate responsible development and transportation systems, and a civic capacity action plan to catalyze healthy civic participation, dialogue, and local governance.