A Hub for Healing Community, Social Action, and Creative Collaboration since 2006
About Us
A hub for healing community, social action, and creative collaboration The Refuge is deeply dedicated to centering those who fall through the cracks of life and faith, living out our shared values in tangible ways, non-hierarchical team leadership, advocating, and collaborating with community partners because we are always better together.
Our Teams
The Refuge is dedicated to inclusive and team leadership. Currently, four teams of leaders serve The Refuge:
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Serve and Sustain -This group of seven people facilitates, nurtures and supports the life of our community, and makes decisions, with input from our two other teams, when necessary.
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Community Life - Our many on-the-ground leaders, who help catalyze different ministries of The Refuge, meet regularly for updates and encouragement regarding: Refuge Café, Refuge Kids, Practical Needs, Single Moms, Social Justice and Creation Care, Advocates Learning Lab, Finances, Recovery, Facilities, Contemplative Arts, Spiritual Formation Sundays, Refuge Reads, #NatureHeals, 12 Steps for Anti-Racism Work, Refuge Rainbow, #dogchurch, the Broomfield Cares Mobile Outreach Team and more.
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Staff - We have a team of 10 part-time paid staff who support The Refuge, Refuge Cafe, Broomfield Cares Mobile Outreach Team, Single Moms Unite, Spiritual Formation, Health Care Advocacy, and Refuge Kids.
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Advisory - This group of seven leaders from outside our community offer us wisdom, encouragement, and, when needed regarding particular challenges, advice.
We also always leave open seats for new and future friends and team members to join us in making dreams reality.
Our Values - the roots of our community
Inspired by the ways of Jesus, we gather around these 6 shared values: Presence, Engagement, Transformation, Welcome, Creativity, and Celebration.
Land Acknowledgement and Our Invitation to Community
We read this aloud at the beginning of many of our gatherings...
We acknowledge that the land we are benefitting from right now is not ours. It was stolen from the people who lived here for many generations–the Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho in addition to over 20 other tribes. While we cannot change past history, we can participate in a better future through awareness, education, repentance, and reparations. Humility, not shame, is the path of healing. We come humbly today with gratitude for this land’s beauty and grief over how our use of it has come to pass. We will do our best to give back–financially and through raising awareness and remaining committed to learning–to honor use of this land.
The Refuge is a hub for healing community, social action, and creative collaboration, serving in Broomfield since 2006. We are young, old, poor, rich, single, married, gay, straight, evangelical, progressive, binary, non-binary, introverts, extroverts, born-here, born-elsewhere, eager, tired, book-smart, street-smart, certain, doubting, hurting, thriving.
We gather in many different ways
but are bound together by our shared values of presence, engagement, transformation, welcome, creativity, and celebration.
Across our differences,
We all give, we all receive.
All of who we are is welcome here.
Practicing Equity
The Refuge has a deep commitment to ongoing learning, trauma-informed principles, and practicing equity as best we can in all areas of our life together across gender and racial identities, mental and physical abilities, socioeconomic realities, faith experiences, and ages.
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We are an open and affirming community, committed to healing wounds and advocating for and with the LGBTQ+ community.
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We are dedicated to the work of racial equity and take responsibility as part of the dominant system to recognize power and privilege and use it to catalyze change.
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We work to break down socioeconomic divides through accessible, authentic healing community.
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We promote health equity and access for the most underserved.
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We value neurodiversity and try to create safe and brave environments so all can thrive.
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We dedicate ourselves to the principles of recovery, where there is no "us" or "them"--there's only us.
"Equity is a practice" - Melvin Bray
What we did last year
