September 11, 2024
After two incredible decades of positively impacting systems, improving lives and creating a more just and equitable community in the Roaring Fork Valley, MANAUS is winding down operations.
This website is our final gesture to honor the work by highlighting our successes and inspiring others to fuel change across the globe.
Celebrating stories from 20 years of innovative service:
Our Mission
MANAUS, formerly the Manaus Fund, was a social justice nonprofit that worked in partnership with others to help create sustainable solutions to issues that further equity within our communities using the principles of community organizing and co-design. With two decades of investments in solutions designed with and by community members, dozens of projects were piloted and five nonprofits founded.
Our Principles & Approach
MANAUS was founded to disrupt philanthropy and impact the donor-nonprofit dynamic, to cultivate community and to address social injustice in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado. Through years of feedback, evolving needs and thoughtful iteration, it developed into the nonprofit of today: representative, innovative, collaborative and supportive.
MANAUS worked at the intersection of human-centered design and community organizing. By partnering throughout the region and bringing together diverse perspectives, we co-created solutions to social justice issues rooted in lived experience.
Everything we piloted at MANAUS is owned and operated by the co-creators. Here and into the future, this allows the community to advance under its own power, for its own sake.
MANAUS’s legacy is in community organizing, power-building and co-design.