Tag: Judy Denison

We Welcome Broker Associate Kathy Jonke to the Golden Real Estate Team

Kathy, who lives in downtown Golden, joined our brokerage this week. We’re no longer an all-male brokerage!

She was born and raised in Wheat Ridge. With her degree in Geology and Earth Sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her career with the U.S. Forest Service in geophysics, she relocated often, which gave her the opportunity to renovate houses and historic commercial buildings, and also to design and build new homes. Her passion for real estate led Kathy to become a real estate broker, and she loves helping people navigate the buying and selling process in the local Golden market.

Kathy settled in Golden five years ago and had a home built in the 9th Street historic district. She is active in the community, where she volunteers with her friend Judy Denison (who I featured recently) at the International Rescue Committee. She also serves on the City of Golden’s Historic Preservation Board. 

Welcome aboard, Kathy! We’re excited to have you on our team!

International Rescue Committee (IRC) Honors Judy Denison of Golden

Judy Denison, 86, was honored this Wednesday by the International Rescue Committee for her indefatigable work obtaining free furniture and housewares for virtually every refugee resettled in Colorado by the IRC since 2020.

From her arrival in Golden 35 years ago, Judy volunteered in countless ways to serve Golden and ultimately to serve refugees, reaching out to involve the rest of us in every possible way.

Her first civic involvement took the form of co-founding Save the Mesas (from being developed by Nike) and joining the fight against ramming a beltway through Golden. She created the “Golden Newsletter” to keep over 1,000 email subscribers informed of that and other campaign/issues as well as the activities of virtually every Golden organization.

Judy’s first local refugee effort was the creation of the Golden Relief Group, which helped seven families who survived Hurricane Katrina.

For the IRC, she used her 2-car garage to store furniture donations for refugees from Afghanistan and a dozen other countries. Golden Real Estate was proud to make our moving truck available for transferring those items to IRC’s warehouse until Judy’s greatest collaboration, which is with CK & Done, an estate sale company. That company donates the unsold furniture and furnishings from estate sales and delivers them to IRC’s warehouse.

The IRC was not the first organization to recognize Judy for her voluntarism and civic mindedness.  In 2012 the Golden Landmarks Association honored her as a “living landmark.”

Space does not allow for a sufficient listing of Judy’s contributions to Golden and our planet, but these links for both those honors provide a lot more details:

https://www.rescue.org/announcement/spotlight-judy-denison-0

http://goldenlandmarks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2012-Judy-Denison-1.pdf

Judy’s prep school, Northfield Mt. Herman, did a podcast interview with her. Here’s the link for that: