In the 1940s, the NW portion of Aurora around East Colfax served as the city’s downtown and boasted itself as the “Gateway to the Rockies”. It was a thriving district, adorned with an assortment of motels, restaurants, boutiques, and all other manners of fine shopping and accommodations for travelers. However, in the 1960s this prosperity dissipated when Interstate-70 opened just three miles north, subsequently detouring the vehicular traffic that kept Aurora’s commercial district thriving. In the 90s, the nearby Stapleton airport closed and the city of Aurora decided to build its new City Hall building further out east, further exacerbating the exodus of drivers away from Original Aurora.

At this same time, NW Aurora was found to be an affordable area by a variety of refugees and immigrants who would move into and enrich the community with eye-catching public art, international cuisine, cultural festivities, and more. Due to this influx of residents from around the world settling into NW Aurora, Aurora as a whole is considered Colorado’s most diverse city where over 120 languages are spoken! Unfortunately, the community remained economically depressed which resulted in a cascading and self-perpetuating series of problems. The lack of career opportunities for residents gave way to an increase in crime, which in turn caused lowering property values and deterioration of infrastructure, which then resulted in further neglect for the area.

In 2006, community leaders recognized these pressing issues and came together to form the Aurora Economic Opportunity Coalition! Since then, it has been the goal of the AEOC to incubate local businesses and professionals, to mitigate gentrification in the face of incoming development, to empower our unique diversity of people and culture, and to ultimately promote long-term community wealth building within the NW Aurora community. Today the AEOC acts as the nerve center for commerce and professional development within NW Aurora by providing workers with jobs, entrepreneurs with client connections, and everybody with skill-based classes, healthcare services, and various other forms of support.

The AEOC provides safety and dignity to the workers of NW Aurora in the form of wage theft representation, contracted work acquisition, safety planning, and by providing computer and English language classes as well as printer access.

Having previously played a key role in Aurora’s COVID response and vaccine distribution, our organization now prides itself on being a community navigator for health services. The AEOC maintains this role by working diligently to increase resident access to healthcare and other programs that support the social determinants of health. Additionally, we are engaging with larger health institutes so that they may learn from and educate our community.

We are dedicated to elevating the Original Aurora district to its former heights through use of our Community Mapping Project. This initiative entails community leaders identifying empty buildings throughout the old town district and finding small, local businesses who would benefit from occupying that space. Amplifying this goal is our promotion of worker co-ops, in which we match like minded professionals with similar goals and provide them with a framework through which they can pool their resources and increase their chances of success.