EMPATHY IN ACTION

As a child, Hamilton Nickoloff asked his grandmother why unhoused people didn’t have homes. Even then, he wasn’t satisfied with the answers. He had no way of knowing he would one day be unhoused or that a degree from Metropolitan State University of Denver would enable him to help others experiencing homelessness.

Nickoloff knows what it means to struggle, citing his history with substance abuse, mental health challenges and homelessness. He wanted to help people in similar circumstances but wasn’t sure if a college degree was realistic, given his zigzag path. He was surprised by what he found at MSU Denver.

“I was stoked to learn that I could take all of my myriad studies and combine them into a uniform degree plan,” Nickoloff said. “It was beautiful for somebody like me.”

His life experiences became a jumpingoff point for a degree in Social Policy and Human Welfare through the University’s Individualized Degree Program, which allows students to customize a degree through interdisciplinary study.

After graduation, Nickoloff got to work helping people experiencing homelessness in Colorado. He did so during unprecedented times. Fueled by a housing crisis and worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, homelessness in the state increased by 39% in 2023, according to a point-in-time snapshot, the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless reported.

Empowered by his degree, Nickoloff got a job at the coalition, which connects thousands of Denverites with housing and health care each year. He works on a large team and with an ever-changing group of clients. “We are dealing in human services, which comes with the complexity of humans,” he said.

For Nickoloff, diving headfirst into those complexities means acknowledging barriers to access, an insight that led him to co-found a nonprofit that helps clients obtain services after getting into housing. Within the next decade, Nickoloff hopes to turn his boots-on-the-ground experience serving the region’s unhoused into a career representing them in Denver City Council and beyond.

“If we want people to recover from those experiences, we’ve got to wrap them in, to show that they’re worthwhile,” he said. “The solutions are very much right in front of us.”