Colorado Health Access Fund

The Denver Foundation has engaged CHI to support its multi-year project that aims to improve access to behavioral health care for Coloradans with high health needs.

May 25, 2018

July 22, 2025

The Colorado Health Access Fund is a grantmaking project of The Denver Foundation that aims to expand behavioral health care access to the neediest Coloradans. The fund awarded up to $5 million a year between 2015 and 2022 to increase access to behavioral health care for Coloradans with high health care needs. It was established in 2015 with an anonymous gift of $40 million.

The Denver Foundation engaged the Colorado Health Institute to support this work in multiple ways.

In 2014, the Colorado Health Institute conducted a comprehensive asset and gap analysis focused on the challenges faced by Coloradans with high health care needs in accessing care. Our research highlighted barriers to care as well as proposed solutions.

Previous Reports

The results of CHI's assets and gaps analysis are summarized in our report, Flashpoints and Fixes. The Denver Foundation used the analysis to help identify meaningful and data-based opportunities for grantmaking by the fund, which launched in April 2015.

The Denver Foundation also engaged CHI to evaluate the fund’s investments. We published our evaluation framework in our report, Leveraging Learning. Results from the fund’s inaugural cohort of 28 grantees are now available. They are summarized in our first annual evaluation report, Building from the Baseline.

Our asset and gap analysis, evaluation framework, and first year of evaluation results are available below.