Lloyd E. Worner Award

Ian Griffis ’85 is the recipient of the 2022 Lloyd E. Worner Award. Ian is co-founder and co-CEO of Griffis Residential, a Denver-based apartment investment fund manager and property operator with approximately 8,000 units under management. Investment markets include Denver, Boulder, Seattle, Portland, Long Beach, San Diego, and Austin, Texas. Griffis has structured real estate investments for over 35 years. Investing in his first project as a Colorado College senior, he initially invested in and developed student housing. With the onset of the RTC crisis in 1989, Griffis expanded the management operation to assist owners in surviving the largest collapse of financial institutions since the Great Depression. An operations-focused investment culture remains a key factor in above benchmark returns — no investor in a Griffis project has ever lost a dollar.

Griffis, with then-partner Buck Blessing, implemented the east campus expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the assemblage of 37 off-campus properties plus the Spencer Center, Wooglins building, and J’s Motel (now the Ed Robson Arena site), expanding the CC campus by approximately 15 percent.

Griffis has a strong interest in conservation, having implemented four conservation easements; the assemblage and creation of an 800-acre public park; and the preservation of an archeological site and section of the historic Cherokee Trail, for which he was awarded the Friends of The Oregon Trail Award.

Together with David Birnbaum and Tom Barta, he is a founding board member of Griffis Gives, a not-for-profit formed to address personal distress and the contributing causes to homelessness. Griffis is a former Trustee of Colorado College and the Fountain Valley School. He is a member of the Casa Serena Society as well as the William Jackson Palmer Society at Colorado College. He holds a B.A. from Colorado College.