ABOUT US
LinkAGES Colorado
Vision
Prevent or reduce social isolation through meaningful connections across ages.
Mission
Make intergenerational programming the norm by building capacity, facilitating collaboration and raising awareness of the power of intergenerational connections.
Executive Director
Rachel B. Cohen, MSW, MUP
Rachel is the Executive Director of LinkAGES and President of Aging Dynamics, a values-based consulting firm working with clients addressing healthy communities from various perspectives, including aging, social service, food security, housing, public health, community development, health care, and more. She has a diverse background in community planning and social work, focusing on gerontology and nonprofit management. She has over 25 years’ experience working and consulting with public and private organizations of all sizes and across sectors such as housing, aging, health care, public health, social services, and community development.
Rachel has a Bachelors in City Planning degree from University of Virginia, Masters of Urban Planning and Social Work degrees with specializations in non-profit management and aging from the University of Michigan.
Ashley Aarti Beck, Associate
Ashley is a multi-passionate entrepreneur. She focuses her efforts on strategy, fundraising, educational content creation, and storytelling. Ashley creates transformative tools and loves to build community. She also cultivates brave spaces where community members, leaders, and stakeholders can come together to dissolve perceived barriers and create solutions that serve all of us.
Ashley has been a writer and storyteller since age six and in social and environmental impact for more than 10 years. She consults with startups, foundations, community-based organizations, and investors to help them create intentional transformation.
Confidence Omenai,
Collective Healing through Art
Confidence Omenai, is a queer Nigerian-American poet, playwright, voice actor, mother of five, and breaker of chains. Her work explores death, rebirth, racism, fracturing the queen/whore dichotomy, and martyrdom on the altar of motherhood and marriage. For fifteen years she has competed, performed and curated shows across the nation.
She is a healing arts coordinator and activist facilitating writing workshops, performing, and encouraging radical self-interrogation around the country at universities, high schools, middle schools, maximum security prisons, juvenile facilities, and more. She is a TEDx MileHigh Poet and Host, Pink Door Fellow, and Oklahoma State University Alum. Her work appears in A La Palabra: The Word is a Woman: Mothers and Daughters.
She currently resides in Denver, creating transformative work across genres, dancing on her dining room table, singing loud, off key, and clearing the way for her rebellious great-granddaughters, who will rule the earth in her name.
Haley Sanner,
Collective Healing through Art
Haley has experience as an innovative community-driven program leader, a passionate trauma-informed facilitator, and an intentional mixed-methods researcher. Haley currently serves on the Healthy Aging team at Colorado Health Network and is a co-founder of Collective Healing Through Art, a LinkAGES program. She has worked in the aging field for over ten years, including with the AARP Foundation, LeadingAge Virginia, and Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountain. She has worked internationally in Nepal for over three years with aging non-profits and older adult community groups and bilingually exploring alternatives to the dominant white culture’s perspective towards aging and multigenerational connections. As one of the founders and co-creators of Collective Healing Through Art, she helped design a trauma-informed curriculum that uses art and storytelling to unpack oppressive systems and teach psychosocial coping skills. Haley is passionate about designing programs that build bridges between people, research, and programmatic solutions to connect us in more equitable, sustainable and communal ways across generations.
Haley has a BS in Mathematics from Davidson College with specializations in social determinants of health, specifically social isolation and emotional well-being. Haley finds joy in being in community with others and believes that intergenerational spaces are necessary for healing, survival, and cultivation of joy.