The Colorado State Legislature is currently deliberating a measure with significant implications for organizations like Catholic Charities that work daily to serve the most vulnerable members of our community. The Homeless Contribution Tax Credit (HCTC), established during the 2022 legislative session, provides a 25% tax credit for individuals who make charitable contributions to eligible organizations engaged in homeless outreach, support, and prevention. The HCTC is set to expire at the end of 2026, and a bill to extend it for another four years, HB26-1015, is being held up over the shortfall in the State’s operating budget.

For agencies like ours, allowing the HCTC to sunset would be a devastating blow to the critical financial support for programs that serve those experiencing or at risk of homelessness. In 2025, over $1.25 million in individual contributions were made through the HCTC program, representing approximately 30% of Catholic Charities’ annual donated revenue. In the past six months alone, over 9,000 unduplicated individuals have received services funded by donors using this tax credit.

We use this funding to provide crisis response services, including free daily meals, cold-weather shelter, diapers, formula, and clothing for children. We use it to support a housing program that helps families out of shelters or their cars and into apartment units. We use it for case management, which helps individuals regain employment, secure housing, and access healthcare.

Think of these services as the community’s immune system, intercepting crises before they become chronic conditions. Take case management as an example. A 2023 study highlighted in the National Library of Medicine found that case management improves outcomes for people with support needs, and that more intensive interventions yield proportionally greater benefits, including meaningful reductions in time spent homeless and measurable improvements in overall well-being. Case management is a coordinated, individualized approach that can include financial assistance, help with job applications, and referrals to complementary providers. For individuals navigating multiple crises simultaneously, this kind of integrated support is often the difference between a temporary hardship and a chronic condition.

The loss of these programs and interventions would hurt more than just the individuals who use them. The cost of homelessness is borne by the community at large in a variety of ways, not least of which is economic. Most estimates put the annual cost of caring for a chronically homeless individual at approximately $35,000 a year. That cost is distributed across our most expensive public support systems: emergency rooms, jails, psychiatric hospitalizations, and police responses.

Our donors are deeply committed to this work, and many would continue giving even without the credit. But the HCTC enables financially savvy donors to give more. Allowing it to lapse would reduce the practical capacity of generous people to give. Smaller contributions mean fewer services, fewer family housed, and fewer case managers.

Beyond program outcomes, the HCTC reveals an important aspect of the relationship among citizens, civil society, and government. Tax credits for charitable contributions are an act of democratic trust. When Coloradans choose to direct their own resources toward services like those Catholic Charities provides, they exercise a form of moral agency that no government program can fully replicate. By providing a tax credit for those contributions, the state acknowledges that organizations rooted in community and accountable to donors are more effective than centralized bureaucracies at addressing the complex realities of poverty and homelessness. It is a policy that empowers civil society, reduces dependency on public systems, and trusts that citizens, when given freedom and incentive, will invest generously in the common good.

Allowing the HCTC to sunset after 2026 would significantly threaten the services that Catholic Charities and similar organizations provide across Colorado. Saving General Fund revenue would result in an exponentially greater loss of private funding for frontline programs that reduce the burden on our most expensive public systems while caring for the least of our brothers and sisters. We urge state leadership not to let it slip away.

Andy Barton has served as the President and CEO of Catholic Charities of Central Colorado since 2015. He serves on the boards of directors of Ascending to Health and Partners in Housing and is a founding member of the Family Solutions Collaborative.