AWARDS 2025
PEACEMAKER BREAKFAST
LIGHT BEARER. PEACE BUILDER.
Our fifth annual Peacemaker Awards Breakfast brought together people of goodwill from across the city to honor four individuals whose lives shine with courage, compassion, and hope.
We enjoyed a beautifully catered breakfast, shared connection, and the celebration of those who remind us that even the smallest light can illuminate the path toward a brighter and more peaceful city.
We also took inspiration from the legacy of Denver pioneer and philanthropist Clara Brown, who became a beacon of hope for those in difficult circumstances in our city’s earliest days.
AWARDEES
About Prince
Prince Kayigire is an author, entrepreneur, speaker, and visionary. Prince is the founder of Cultivar, drawing on his childhood farming roots to create a corner café at Denver’s historic Molly Brown House—a dynamic space for connection and gatherings. He is the author of Prince: Beauty for Ashes, a courageous and inspiring memoir of his survival amid the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Prince is trained in Business and Sustainable Development from Brandeis University and is a 2014 World Bank Scholar.
Award engraving: The courage to tell your story.
About Sandy
Sandy Douglas is a steward at Jordan Chapel AME Church, loving the work she does for God in various ministries. Holding a graduate degree in nonprofit management, Sandy has played an instrumental role in numerous organizations in Northeast Denver including Neighbors Together and My Outdoor Colorado—where she currently works to get young people outdoors. Sandy was a key visionary and advocate for Mile High Ministries’ Clara Brown Commons community. Sandy enjoys life as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
Award engraving: Community. That’s what we’re all about!
About Ray and Marilyn
Ray and Marilyn Stranske are widely recognized as pioneers and practitioners in affordable housing development in Denver. Together they founded and directed Hope Communities, an affordable housing non-profit with an emphasis on community building—creating thousands of residences across the Denver area. Marilyn has been a local and national community organizer, justice system advocate, counseling supervisor, clergy organizer, fundraiser, and board leader of numerous organizations and international NGOs. She now focuses her work on individual and collective trauma healing. Ray was raised in Sudan and met Marilyn in a small local church in Denver’s Baker neighborhood. As a young couple they found their calling helping neighbors who were being evicted. A recipient of numerous awards, Ray is now Principal at RaiseHomes LLC, offering project development assistance to affordable housing organizations.
Award engraving: Community: the thread through everything.
A Joy-Filled Morning!
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Clara Brown, Peacemaker
“Aunt Clara” Brown was a Colorado pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and peacemaker who understood that we are all connected to one another like branches on a vine: what happens to any one of us matters to all of us. After nearly sixty years in bondage, Clara came to Colorado in search of her family and became the heart and soul of her community.
Aunt Clara cared for the sick and destitute, built churches, spent her own fortune to help formerly enslaved people attend college or start new lives in Colorado, all the while building a successful business, resisting discrimination, and searching for the family from whom she had been separated by their enslavers. She became known fondly as “The Angel of the Rockies.”
Clara is buried at Riverside Cemetery, just minutes away from Clara Brown Commons—the Mile High Ministries’ housing community named in her honor. As peacemakers today, we can work together to follow Aunt Clara’s example of compassion, generosity, and neighborly love.
Couldn’t Make It?
We welcome your donation to Mile High Ministries in honor of this year’s awardees, toward our work of “housing that heals.”
