From unhoused to unstoppable

This story appears in the fall 2024 issue of RED Magazine.

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 that being unhoused would one day be part of his own lived experience or that a degree from Metropolitan State University of Denver would help him assist 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 confronting similar circumstances. He just wasn’t sure if he would be able to attain a degree, given his “long and staggered history of education.” He applied to MSU Denver and was surprised by what he found.

“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.”

He used his experience as a jumping-off point for an independent degree in Social Policy and Human Welfare through MSU Denver’s Individualized Degree Program, which allows students to customize a degree through interdisciplinary study. Soon, he was immersed in such subjects as sociology and ethics, transforming his personal history into what he calls “a total picture of what it is to be human.”

After graduation, Nickoloff got to work helping people experiencing homelessness in Colorado. He did so during unprecedented times. Fueled by an ongoing housing crisis and worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, homelessness is rising in Denver and beyond, challenging advocates and stretching social services to their limits. The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless reported that, according to the annual point-in-time snapshot, homelessness in the state increased by 39% in 2023, with 14,439 individuals experiencing homelessness.

Empowered by his degree from MSU Denver, Nickoloff got a job at the coalition, a nonprofit that 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.

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For Nickoloff, diving headfirst into those complexities also means acknowledging critical gaps and barriers to access, insights that led him to co-found a nonprofit to help clients obtain services after getting into housing.

“We’re not there to tell clients what to do,” he said. “We’re there to demonstrate what’s available and what a transition from one phase of life to the next could look like.”

Nickoloff credits his time at MSU Denver and the mentorship of teachers such as Sheila Rucki, Ph.D., professor of Political Science, for shaping his future. He said Rucki helped him see the overarching picture of how we’ve governed one another and which models have worked and which have not.

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.”