As a 52 year-old, 4 feet 9 inches tall former elementary school music teacher, Dena Creaser does not have a typical security guard background. But two years ago, she was looking for a new job and saw a listing for Fort Collins Marketplace in Colorado. She thought: “I could do that.” Because to Dena, security did not evoke images of military or police enforcement.
It was more about people and community. “It meant keeping people feeling safe and secure, and that’s always been my role,” she explained.
As a caretaker by nature, and a teacher of small kids, Creaser developed ways of communicating, mediating arguments, and reading people. Teaching, she said, “gives you a basis on how to understand people and how to talk to people. I’d taken lots of classes on development and mental issues, so it kind of fit together.”
Danaria McCoy, vice president of operations and marketing for NewMark Merrill Cos., owner of Fort Collins Marketplace, recognized that “Dena has just the exact skill set we’re looking for: someone you’re proud to put in front of your tenants and your patrons as someone who really cares about the shopping center and the community.”
On her first days on the job, though, Creaser wasn’t quite sure. At one of the city’s busiest intersections, Fort Collins Marketplace, is a grocery-anchored neighborhood center that attracts college students, community members and some homeless people. As Creaser patrolled, checking on tenants and customers, she saw a homeless woman with her dog huddled in a corner. There were also a few men stumbling about, reeking of alcohol. Even though, some of the people “just broke my heart,” Creaser knew her responsibility was to move anybody sleeping and any panhandlers off the property. She figured: “If I got their names and started to know them, they might start to feel more comfortable with me and then it would be easier to move them on.” She also hoped they’d be nicer to her. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not.
To process these experiences and work through them after work, Creaser would sketch the people she met: The drunk man she sat with at lunch or the woman clutching her dog like a stuffed animal. Spending time with these people meant she knew more about them. For example, she found out the woman was recently widowed and she held onto the dog because it was her only remaining comfort.
But Creaser’s portraits weren’t all of sadness and hard times. She also drew pictures of patrons, shop owners’ families and other people she got to know on her daily patrols.
She was simply documenting the human experience. “You look at the pictures and you see a human being. Even the person standing there screaming at you — that’s a human being, and they deserve kindness and love,” Creaser said.
Her medium, charcoal, is an unexpected, messy choice. “It smudges,” she said. “It looks broken because the lines don’t all connect.” But her pictures were captivating.
As Creaser got to know these people, she noted what each one needed. Some were obvious like snacks, water and blankets. Others were less obvious: guitar string replacements, harmonicas and other instruments. “A lot of [these people] are musical,” she said, that’s a language Creaser, the former music teacher understands well. “It’s something I could talk about easily,” she said. When one man said he’d always wanted to learn guitar, Creaser lent him hers, and then she bought guitars for others with fundraising support from her former high school classmates.
Landlord, Tenants and Community Members All Get Involved in Her Art
Eventually, NewMark Merrill’s leadership discovered Creaser’s off-hours work. For certain retail landlords, this sort of philanthropy might raise concerns, scraping the line of encouraging homeless individuals to settle on the premises. “We want to make our shopping centers safe places and create environments for our tenants to be successful and for our patrons to have a welcoming retail experience,” McCoy explained, “but we also want to be kind.” NewMark Merrill has come to believe there are different ways to keep people safe, and Creaser’s way of doing things “was one of the best approaches we’d seen,” McCoy said. In fact, the company has encouraged security personnel at its other properties to adopt Creaser’s approach.
Rather than curtailing Creaser’s efforts to distribute supplies, NewMark Merrill purchased them for her. There’s not a budget, McCoy said, but rather, when Creaser expresses a need, the company tries to fill it.
Creaser also continues to draw the people and things she notices on her patrols. One day, she showed her sketches to Ashley Doebbeling, the owner of Brightway Insurance, a Fort Collins Marketplace tenant. Doebbeling was shocked. “I had no idea she was an artist,” said Doebbeling, who loved the drawings. “They kind of tell their own story. They’re not too finely detailed where you might be able to recognize exactly who the person is, but you get a sense from the drawings about who the person is and what they’re about.” Watch a video below about Haley Titus’ Kind Words mural at Marketplace 99 in Elk Grove, California, which incorporates a sketch of some of the women who work at Brightway.
And when other Brightway employees saw the sketches, they offered to help Creaser self-publish a book. Doebbeling said. “Dena has a really tough job. She goes above and beyond. She puts herself in situations that aren’t comfortable. It could be picking up trash or having to wake someone up out of a dead sleep. We wanted her to know that other people are looking out for her, just like she’s looking out for all of us.”
Creaser allocated funds from the book, which she published on Amazon, to local organizations focused on homelessness and suicide prevention.
BUY THE BOOK: Out of the Shadows: Drawings from My Daily Walk by Dena Creaser
When NewMark Merrill leaders saw the book, they were amazed. “It was a combination of artistic talent and storytelling and empathy,” McCoy said. “The world is a place full of stories when you’re as observant and caring as Dena.”
Before COVID, NewMark Merrill had started a community initiative to use its centers to bring people together through public art and murals. The company’s leaders just knew Creaser’s drawings should be a piece of that community art program, McCoy said. The company commissioned artists to integrate Creaser’s sketches into murals at four separate NewMark Merrill mixed-use properties. The resounding messages revolve around Creaser’s life philosophy: “Don’t wait to be kind.”
When Angie Nordstrum, who painted the first mural, saw Creaser’s sketches for the first time, she cried. “She captured moments of kindness and caring for each other in the most unexpected of places,” Nordstrum said. The drawing she chose for her mural was of a younger man reaching to help an older woman. Only after painting the mural did Nordstrum find out it was a sketch of Creaser’s mother and son. The mural was unveiled at Village at the Peaks in Longmont, Colorado on Aug. 14, the anniversary of the death of Creaser’s mother.
Creaser herself does not care much for publicity and shrugs off the attention she’s been getting. But NewMark Merrill leadership “wanted the whole world to see what Dena is doing,” McCoy said. Creaser deserves to be seen “because as a community builder, she’s a fabulous person making a difference.”
When asked what she hopes community members, tenants and customers will take from the murals, Creaser offered this guidance: “Get to know people. Say hi. Smile. We’re all human beings and we all deserve to be treated with respect and love.”