Meet Katie Symons | Supportive Housing Consultant

We had the good fortune of connecting with Katie Symons and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Katie, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
The people living in Supportive Housing communities are the most important part of any project that we work on at BeauxSimone Consulting. At the end of the day, we are doing this work to make our communities — and the people in them — safer, stronger and healthier.

BeauxSimone Consulting was founded by Katie Symons and Zoe LeBeau in 2019. As a women-owned small business, we exist to provide developers, architects, property managers and service providers with the tools and skills that are needed to build and operate high-quality supportive and affordable housing. At the same time, we are helping non-profits build their own capacity to address homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in their communities.

BSC, with its subcontractors, has over 60 years of collective experience doing everything from direct service running DV shelters, overseeing street outreach and emergency shelters, and running supportive housing buildings to developing housing and working with local, state and tribal governments on policy to fund affordable housing for people who need it the most. To date, we’ve helped to create over 2,500 units across the country, with another 1,000 in the pipeline.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Prior to working in the homeless services and housing world, I spent about 9 years in Higher Education at the University of Denver. I worked in the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning there and also ran a Living and Learning Community focused on social justice and social change. It was my students who truly inspired me year after year to think about ways to solve some of our community’s biggest problems. In doing the work I do today, I still am inspired by the voices and actions of some of those young people. In 2005, when the City & County of Denver first came out with its 10-year plan to address homelessness, our Center at DU decided to get involved. We went to talk with city leaders about how the university could help in addressing the problem. Over the next three years, I helped coordinated a number of efforts in partnership with the City. DU hosted three Project Homeless Connect events, which are 1-day “resource fairs” where vendors and service providers from the community come to one location, and people experiencing homelessness can access anything they need, like IDs, birth certificates, medical care, employment services including building resumes and doing job searches, housing assistance, food, massages, haircuts, clothing and shoes, etc. We recruited 1,000 DU students who were trained ahead of time and then matched 1:1 with a person who came to the event. They were there to serve as their “resource navigator” and to also walk alongside the person for the day, experiencing what it was like to have to navigate all of these systems when someone is experiencing homelessness (oftentimes with no ID or income or anything more than the clothes they were wearing at the time). It was really impactful for the students, staff and faculty who participated in these events, and I do believe it was a real opportunity for people to learn about the issue of homelessness and therefore, not just become more empathetic about the issue but also hopefully be driven to do more in the community. I also helped to recruit students from the Graduate School of Social Work to staff emergency shelters that were set up around the city as overflow shelters in the winter months when the shelters filled up. Finally, I worked with some faculty members who engaged in research projects in the community with local non-profits addressing homelessness and housing insecurity. In 2009, I was recruited to go and work for the City and that’s when I began working for what was then called Denver’s Road Home, overseeing emergency shelters, street outreach efforts, continued community engagement with Project Homeless Connects and other events and general crisis management when it came to helping folks who came to the Department of Human Services where my office was.
That was a very challenging time in my career. It was basically like drinking from a firehose for 2 years, being on-call non-stop, getting calls in the middle of the night from the police who were looking for a place for a woman fleeing from Domestic Violence to go, dealing with a 300-bed shelter closing down, and a surge in homelessness after the 2007-2009 recession. I left the city in 2011 and went to consult with the Governor’s office. I was interested in working more on policy changes and spent an entire year traveling around the state of Colorado assessing homelessness in rural communities. It was no surprise that there were people experiencing homelessness all over the state, it just looked very different in rural communities than in urban areas. That ultimately led me to forming my own consulting company to help communities address their challenges with homelessness. I worked for various partners over the next few years; I met Zoe in 2015 and starting working closely with her. In 2019, we finally formed BeauxSimone Consulting together and that’s where I am today.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
A concert at Red Rocks for sure. Hiking anywhere around Buena Vista and Salida, and if it is in the fall, catching the leaves changing on Kenosha pass.
Camping if time allowed; some of my favorite campsites are Peaceful Valley outside of Ward, and Difficult Campground outside of Aspen.
Denver specific spots: Dinner at Potager or Table 6 in Cap Hill
Drinks at the Yacht Club, Cruise Room or Cooper Lounge at the top of Union Station after walking around that area.
Catch a move at the Esquire Theatre.
See a view of the mountains and a sunset from the sundial at Cranmer Park.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Wow, this is a tough question, as I feel like there are so many folks who have helped me get to where I am in my career. For starters, I want to give a shoutout to a man named Randle Loeb, who has taught me everything I know about homelessness, as someone who has experienced it on and off for 20+ years while struggling with bi-polar and other mental health challenges. Jamie Van Leeuwen took a chance on me when he gave me a job at the City & County of Denver back in 2009. My wife, Robin, has supported my success over the past 9 years, and my “work wife” Zoe LeBeau is the person Id’ like to give a lot of credit to. As the other half of BeauxSimone, I wouldn’t be where I am with our business if it weren’t for her.

Website: www.beauxsimone.com

Instagram: beaux_simone

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiesymons/

Twitter: Beaux_simone

Facebook: www.facebook.com/beauxsimone

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vc5-qTzIU&t=5s

Image Credits
All photographers were iPhone users from the BSC team.