by Haines Eason

May 5, 2016

Last month, in what turned out to be a close and contentious election, Denver’s Inter-neighborhood Cooperation (INC) elected Denver native J.J. Niemann as president. Niemann steps in after Larry Ambrose’s tenure, and in an April 18 conversation, Niemann gave The Profile a sense of who he is and where it is he sees INC heading.

From the INC website: INC “is a voluntary, non-profit coalition of representatives from Denver’s registered neighborhood organizations (RNOs), city agencies and others that gather to promote responsible city change and growth.”

What follows is a Q&A between this writer and Niemann on topics ranging from his immediate plans for the organization to his working style to where he sees INC in the future.

HE: Now that the election results have been finalized, what is your first order of business?

JJN: I’ll start off by saying thanks to everyone who came out and voted. The first order of business was to make sure that a certification of the vote happened, but now that it has—and we had our first meeting very successfully—it’s reaching out and saying thanks to everyone in the neighborhoods who participate in INC and asking them to continue to participate.

HE: There are issues with drainage, there are issues with construction, I-70, there are issues with homelessness, these are all issues that have come up in past meetings… Which of those do you personally want to go after first?

JJN: I’m not so much an issues person as I am a systems person. I was born and raised on the north side of Denver, and what that gave me was an opportunity to grow up in the movement of neighborhood activity. I really believe RNOs are a special thing that Denver has created, and [these RNOs] allow neighborhoods to have a voice.

So, whether it’s any individual issue, those usually come up through the neighborhoods. But the thing that’s missing is what I’m really good at, which is project management. I have a project management degree from the University of Colorado, I have a master’s in organizing people and being able to see systems and understand how systems work and understand how to continuously improve those systems.

This has also been a passion for me. Driving back and forth to CU, I became more and more interested in how you combine the idea of systems thinking with business acumen and community mindedness and this focus on wanting to understand how people can communicate better. Any individual issue is going to be best solved if we have a system in place.

HE: To that, what’s your leadership style and how will it help you in this role?

JJN: My style is to be very communicative and engaging with people. I’m a people person, as they say. My uncle, who was an alderman in St. Louis, my great uncle Joe, what he always said was he’d never met a stranger, he just met a friend he hadn’t met yet. And that’s part of why I really like the INC.

Ever since I joined I’ve been able to make friends, whether it’s through the board of directors or through individual committees, and the people I’ve met have been amazing people who I’ve been able to learn things from. So, I have this style that is focused on listening, not as much telling people what to do.

If you’re going to have an umbrella organization of organizations … we’re a whole room of leaders, so what we need is some more people to listen, and that’s my style.

HE: Talk to me about your past involvement with INC. What do people need to know? What have you done, and how will that inform your presidency?

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