With her fingerprints on many Durango institutions, including law-enforcement agencies and family-focused nonprofits, Lauren Patterson has worked for change for decades.
The Durango native’s work started with a mothers’ center in the 1980s, and over the years she has helped start crisis-intervention training to teach law enforcement how to work with the mentally ill, promoted cultural awareness and worked to engage with teens and youth.
Along the way, she helped found and run a charter school and volunteered with many nonprofits, including Southwest Youth Corps, Del Alma, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Southwest Colorado and La Plata Family Centers Coalition.
Her volunteer work led to paid positions with some organizations and later to consulting work as a program evaluator for nonprofits. She still works for Celebrating Healthy Communities and the La Plata Family Centers Coalition as a consultant.
“I think some of us are just hardwired for doing community work that creates benefit for ourselves, our families and communities,” she said.
While the mothers’ center gave her professional tools, such as grant writing, to create change, she learned about inequality and the need for change much earlier.
In 1965, when she was 12, she lived in west Los Angeles during the Watts riots, which started after an African-American man was pulled over and arrested.
“Tons of buildings were burned and destroyed,” she said.
Later, kids from south Los Angeles were bused to her junior high in west Los Angeles, she recalled.
She came back to Durango in 1979 to work at her family’s guest ranch, Colorado Trails.
Through much of her career, she has worked with marginalized and oppressed people, and in recent years, she has encouraged cultural awareness through the Embracing Diversity Initiative and the Prejudice Elimination Action Team that meets at Durango High School. She also helps organize the annual Diversity Dialogue.
“When I see the inequity of our world, hear people with their bias and prejudice, ... I can understand it intellectually, that it’s really fear. It just bothers me in my core.”
As part of the action team, the high school students work with adults to assess the cultural competency of businesses, nonprofits and governmental groups. This includes asking the leadership about the makeup of their staff, how their mission or vision supports multiculturalism and if they provide multicultural training.
In recent months, the political rhetoric that has focused on race has demonstrated to her that this work is as important as ever.
“Cultural competence isn’t a place you arrive because you do steps one, two, three,” Patterson said. She describes it as a lifelong journey.
Training police to work with those in a mental-health crisis was one of her missions for 10 years as a volunteer and paid coordinator.
After the son of her close friend had a bad experience with law enforcement, the two decided to bring the trainings to police agencies and the La Plata County Jail.
“It was one of those things where the community said: ‘That sounds like a good idea,’” she recalled. “There was zero resistance.”
The annual trainings started in 2003, and they have made big difference, said Lt. Ray Shupe, who helped start the program at the Durango Police Department.
Many officers didn’t know how to de-escalate someone having a mental crisis and they would take them to jail, Shupe said.
“A lot of the time, we were taking the easy out,” he said.
Patterson helped them coordinate with other agencies to come up with alternatives to jail. In addition, Axis Health System started providing on-call crisis managers.
“Lauren came in at just the right time to get some cooperation going,” Shupe said.
Educating kids and teens has also been a focus for her.
She worked with other parents to found Community of Learners, a charter school focused on experiential learning that opened in 1995. She helped found the school because she reasoned it would be easier than to home-school her kids, and both of her sons attended.
It was open for seven years, and it had the highest rate of special-needs students in the area.
“For some of those kids, it was perfect,” she said.
She went on to work on the La Plata Children, Youth and Family Master Plan. The plan looked at how to help kids, teens and families thrive in all areas of life. Patterson’s friend of 34 years, Vicki Coe, worked on the master plan and many projects with her and Coe attributes Patterson’s activism to deep compassion.
“She really, really listens on a deep level and suspends her own agenda while she is making observations and listening,” Coe said.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
