our mission

Just 19 years old and new to Denver, Corazon sold the watch her father gave her so she could pay her rent. In those early days, she said, “I would eat a single slice of bread and drink many glasses of water until I could pay for food again.”

Corazon, now 77, is one of the 2.9 million US women and 35,000 Colorado women over the age of 65 who are experiencing poverty. Women are more likely to live in poverty at every stage of their life, and a woman’s longer life expectancy means the lower wages and financial hits they took throughout their life must be stretched further, but a dollar can only stretch so far. It is clear: as the Baby Boomer generation ages into retirement, women are aging into poverty.

It’s 2018 and women still make 83 cents (or less) to a white man’s dollar. The wage gap is real. It is systemic. And it is getting worse.

Despite claims otherwise, substantial research reveals that after controlling for race, region, unionization status, education, work experience, occupation, and industry 38 percent of the pay gap remains “unexplained” [1]. Our 30 years of experience and expertise suggests that discrimination is the “unexplained” factor.

The top 1% of Colorado’s earners capture 44% of all income generated. That’s a big problem for the people we serve.

A report from the Economic Policy Institute for the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) revealed that in 2015, Colorado ranked 20th in the country for income inequality and with the top 1 percent capturing 44 percent of all income growth in the last 45 years.

At The Gathering Place, we see this as a narrow snapshot into a larger problem of a city and state in the midst of a population and economic boom that has left countless families behind.