Jamie Giellis went from living on a farm in a town of 250 people to consulting with the Singapore government, working for the labor party in the UK and running for mayor of Denver, all while running her own consulting business, Centro Inc., which focuses on neighborhood revitalization. 

Giellis received her undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa in journalism and then went on to get her master’s at the University of Colorado Denver in public administration. 

Giellis’s career in neighborhood development started at Downtown District in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. When she moved to Denver in 2006, she worked for a small consulting firm where she worked specifically on downtown redevelopment all over the nation which allowed her to experience “all these diverse perspectives.” Giellis quickly realized that she was more interested in the urban neighborhood side of things rather than downtown development. 

Based on that desire, she started Centro Inc. in 2009. While she had hired some employees, Giellis found that due to the amount of international travel in her work, she was better off without them. Having no employees “allows [her] to be nimble,” Giellis said. Instead of sending a team to a local community out of the country, she will go herself or hire someone from that community to do the outreach. 

While serving on the International Downtown Association Board for six years, Giellis met a lot of international people including some folks from the Singapore government, who were looking for a consultant. Beating out five other firms, including the one she had just left, she got the deal with the Singapore Government and worked with them for three years, helping them in revitalizing their community. 

Giellis also spent some time in the U.K. working for the Labour Party full-time in 2013, until she decided she was “tired of living out of suitcases,” and wanted to focus on her neighborhood work in Denver full time. 

Giellis was already involved with RiNo (River North Art District) for a few years but after her return to Denver in 2014 she helped form two special taxing districts in the area to stabilize the neighborhood for artists and small businesses. She served as the president of that organization until the end of 2018 when she announced that she was going to run for mayor of Denver. 

In 2019, when Giellis began her campaign, her opponent Michael Hancock was the incumbent mayor, running for his final term. Many conversations sparked about who the people of Denver wanted to represent the city. 

“The other piece of the puzzle was that there has never been a woman mayor of Denver so that was also a big part of the conversation,” said Giellis. 

Despite the challenges that came in the election, Giellis got past the first election in May of 2019 and made it to the runoff, where she lost to Hancock, who is the current mayor of Denver. 

Giellis ran because she felt the city lacked care and concern for the daily experiences of its residents. Her campaign focus was on neighborhood revitalization. “The city is getting so big, we need to work with neighborhoods to create nuanced approaches to problem-solving because each neighborhood comes with its own challenges,” said Giellis. 

She was also inspired to run because she wanted to spark conversations around the city’s key issues such as homelessness, affordable housing, transportation and environmental issues.

Giellis’s passion for neighborhood redevelopment with the culture, arts and history at its core is what brought her back to politics, after being frustrated with her loss and Denver as a whole. 

“I think there were moments over the last few years where I thought, I don’t ever wanna look at it, touch it, do it again, but I ran for a reason.” Giellis flew under the radar for some time after her loss until she met Kwame Spearman, who had the same passion for the city and its residents as she did. 

Spearman is running for the upcoming mayoral election this spring with Giellis’s support. She believes in his vision for the city, and she appreciates the fact that he is a businessman, as the CEO of Tattered Cover Bookstores. With the recent changes to campaign finance rules in Denver, she recognizes that it is harder to raise money quickly, but she remains optimistic about the future and is excited to see how the next six weeks play out.

With 17 candidates in the race, an open seat for mayor, and the new fair funding laws for local elections, “this is a race unlike the city has ever seen,” said Giellis. 

When asked what Giellis liked to do in her free time, she responded, “I don’t!” All jokes aside, Giellis enjoys traveling, reading, and working on her book. She attended a writing workshop in New York with author Cheryl Strayed, who is most famous for her memoir book “Wild.” Giellis notes that her book “isn’t necessarily the biography of [her] life” because she plans on wrapping in both personal and professional advice as well, in order to further help people and their communities. 

Giellis is living proof that no matter where you come from – even a small farm town in Iowa – you can make a difference in the world.