What exactly is self-sufficiency?

And why does it matter?

In April of last year, we released a report called the Gunnison County State of the Community 2025. This report was a follow-up to the previous, and much longer, State of the Community Report from 2022 that was commissioned by the Health Coalition of the Gunnison Valley (formerly the Gunnison County Community Health Coalition), of which CFGV is a member.

The goal of the original report was to capture a holistic view of the community and use data to explore different aspects of community life, benchmarking them against peers. The report had a focus on “behavioral health,” defined as, “how environmental factors (e.g. housing and food security, jobs, childcare, access to and coordination of health services, home life, social isolation) contribute to mental and physical health outcomes.” (State of the Community 2022 Report: Behavioral Health Needs and Gaps Analysis for Gunnison County) The result was a 283–page comprehensive dive into dozens of different metrics that explore the “ecosystem” of the Gunnison Valley community.   

With the 2025 update, CFGV and the research team focused on a few of the biggest challenge areas to see how things changed on the ground in the intervening years. Ultimately, the original State of the Community Report in 2022 found that “declining behavioral health was highly correlated with deteriorating economic conditions.” As more working people in the Gunnison County community experienced financial hardship, other challenges arose. The 2025 update had similar findings.  

When you arrive at a medical facility, the first thing they do when they take you back to an exam room is check your vital signs. Taking a quick peek at the percentage of our community members who live at or above “self-sufficiency” is kind of like looking at a patient’s vital signs. Here’s why: 

The “Self-Sufficiency Standard” was originally developed by the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington School of Social Work. They describe it as a “budget-based, living wage measure that defines the real cost of living for working families at a minimally adequate level.” The self-sufficiency dataset looks at basic, but comprehensive, budgets for families of dozens of different compositions (e.g. one adult and one preschooler, two adults and three children of various ages, etc.) and breaks those costs out by county. The budget calculation includes the following items:

• Housing 
• Childcare
• Food
• Transportation
• Health Care
• Miscellaneous (including Broadband & Cellphone and Other Necessities) 
• Taxes
• Earned Income Tax Credit (-)
• Child Care Tax Credit (-)
• Child Tax Credit (-)
• Emergency Savings Fund 

You can find a link to the most recent dataset for Colorado here and within that file, you can find Gunnison County’s numbers.

The Self-Sufficiency Standard is an alternative to the federal poverty measure, which was developed in 1963. The federal poverty measure (FPM) uses a “poverty threshold” that is three times the cost of a minimum food diet from 1963 (in today’s dollars). This is a blanket number used for the United States. There is a separate Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that captures some of the factors that the Self-Sufficiency Standard captures and it does consider geographic difference in housing costs. This infographic from the Census Bureau gives you an overview of the FPM and the SPM:  

Given the high costs of housing, healthcare, and other basic services in our isolated mountain community, CFGV and our research team think that the Self-Sufficiency Standard does a much better job of capturing the percentage of Gunnison County residents who are in danger of falling through the gaps. That’s why we’re using it as one of our community’s key vital signs. CFGV’s vision is to inspire and connect people so everyone can thrive. With over 40% of community members living below the Self-Sufficiency Standard, we still see a great deal of work ahead of our community as we strive towards that vision.

Both State of the Community reports identified an alarming problem for Gunnison County: the size of the “missing middle.” The FPM identifies about 13% of Gunnison County residents as living below the poverty threshold. This is the percentage of the community who qualify for federal benefits. This percentage has been relatively steady over the last several years. However, in the last year, there have been changes in how access to benefits has been determined. We will begin to see the ripples from those changes moving forward. 

At the same time, as the cost of other necessities has gone up over time and eaten up a larger portion of a household’s take-home income, the FPM (which is based on food costs) misses about a third of Gunnison County residents. The updated State of the Community from 2025 found that about 41% of community members live below self-sufficiency.  That means roughly 28% of residents, nearly one third, are in the “missing middle” where they earn too much to receive federal benefits, but don’t earn enough to cover their basic expenses. With economic conditions correlating so strongly to behavioral health, the impacts of this challenge both test our behavioral health infrastructure as a community and have acute negative effects on individual community members. The chart below is from the Gunnison County State of the Community 2025.

With nearly one third of community members living in that missing middle, Gunnison County’s nonprofits, the generous donors who support them, and the volunteers who provide the manpower to keep them going (who are sometimes in the “missing middle” themselves), are literally keeping this community going. Thank you.  

Organizations like the Gunnison Country Food Pantry and Mountain Roots Food Project help community members access free food so that income that would otherwise go to the grocery budget can shift to cover healthcare or housing costs. Nonprofit childcare centers offer tuition assistance to some families, allowing parents to put those dollars towards the costs of utilities or transportation or allow a parent who might otherwise stay home to care for kids the opportunity to work and lift their family out of poverty. Tuition assistance for extracurricular activities (dance, sports, etc.) allow all kids to be a part of core experiences that will shape them into engaged community members. Your generosity and the nonprofits you support with your gifts and time are helping people of all ages in Gunnison County have the opportunity to thrive.