The Alliance Center Past, Present, and Future
When you walk into 1536 Wynkoop Street, you'll find a building with layers: there are the original Douglas fir beams from 1908, an elevator tower left over from a developer's 1980s dream, and glass walls from a 2014 renovation that still sets the standard for green buildings in Colorado.
The community inside has layers too. For more than two decades, The Alliance Center has been a place where people, organizations, and ideas come together to build a more sustainable and connected future. Some of you may have walked through our doors in 2004 and helped shape what this place became. Others may have found us just this past year at a Community Coworking Day. Many of you know one part of our story, but might have missed the rest.
That’s why we’re inviting you on a journey to rediscover The Alliance Center's past, present, and future.
How Our Mission Began
Our nonprofit story begins on June 30, 2004. That day, John Powers and Janna Six bought this 1908 LoDo warehouse so that mission-driven organizations could share space, costs, and ideas under one roof. Within weeks, our basement became headquarters for Amendment 37, the first voter-approved renewable energy standard in the country. In 2008, our parking lot hosted the Big Tent during the Democratic National Convention. Between 2004 and 2026 the building earned 8 LEED certifications and served for years as both a living laboratory and an educational site for sustainable building practice.
Read more about our history here.
Who We Are Today
Today, The Alliance Center is still a trusted civic space at the heart of Colorado's climate and justice communities. 46 tenant organizations call the building home right now, from Sierra Club and Western Resources Advocates to Free Speech TV and Trout Unlimited. See our full list of tenants here.
The last two years have asked a lot of all of us. In March 2025, after a wave of federal funding cuts, more than 120 people packed into the building to ask each other, Where do we go from here? One participant put it plainly: "We need each other right now." What grew out of that evening—including volunteer-led Job Seeker Meetups for people navigating layoffs in the climate sector—shaped how we’re serving this community today.
Where We're Headed
The future is ours to build together. We last renovated the building in 2014, a few years before the pandemic changed how people live and work in cities. Now we're gathering our community again to ask what a shared workspace for Colorado's climate and justice community should look like over the next ten years.
This fall, we're exploring that question in the open. A series of workshops in October and November are drawing on the latest research on the future of work and shared office space, and on conversations with the organizations who work here today. We're inviting peers, partners, and Colorado's creative community to help us imagine what this building could become.
Save the date for November 6. Together, we'll shape a vision that will guide how we invest in the Alliance Center for the next decade—and we hope what we learn can serve as a model for other mission-driven shared workspaces too.
Come Along
If you have ideas about what makes a space inviting and effective, we want to hear them; please join us at The Alliance Center on November 6 to see what we’re learning and share your feedback.
Follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the coming weeks. Share the posts with someone who remembers the early days, or with someone who's never been inside. If you have a story or a photo from your time here, send it our way—we'd love to include it.
Better yet, come see us in person. Grab a coffee at Convivio Café, join us for a Community Coworking Day, or see upcoming events. We want you to be part of what’s next!
See you soon,
Alison Carlman Executive Director, The Alliance Center
