Time to roll up our economic development sleeves - Western Colorado Alliance for Community Action

[Note: Learn more about our upcoming event, Building Homegrown Prosperity.]

We want life to be simple. We don’t want to have to work three jobs to stay here.
We want to keep things the way they are.
The world is changing — how do we lead the conversation as opposed to having it done to us?
— Comments gathered in 2017 Western Colorado Alliance assesssment

Over the past few years, our Alliance for Community Action has done a lot of listening. After gathering extensive feedback on our organization and our work in 2017, we responded by updating not only our name and logo, but also our mission and vision statements. With these updates, we responded to direct feedback from our communities about the need to get back to basics: community organizing and training for everyday Western Slope folks so we can build the world we want to see.

We also heard loud and clear that the world we want to see must include a rural economy that provides a future for working families in western Colorado. We are living through a political era where the global economy is transforming itself and, largely, leaving rural communities behind.

This information is not new. Our members across western Colorado have lived through the impacts of boom and bust cycles. Many of us remember Black Sunday when Exxon closed its oil shale operations in 1982 and laid off 2,000 workers overnight.

And one only has to look through our filing cabinet to see how issues we have worked on for decades are tied to the cycles of extractive industries. Whether we were fighting aspen clear-cutting, radioactive waste dumps or drilling rigs next to homes, many of our campaigns have been – at their core – attempts to balance the impacts of industrial development with ecological and community health.

Jobs vs environment is always a false choice

For decades, we have been told that rural economies were dependent on these industrial projects, and the conversation boiled down to the usual refrain of “jobs vs. the environment.” And for decades, we have pushed back on that narrative, insisting that we do not need to choose between our health and a job.

Our Alliance members have always known that there is a different economic future to be built on other resources, skills and knowledge found here in western Colorado. And at times, we have come together to help bring it into being by passing laws to allow farmers to sell goods directly from their kitchens and by opening up renewable energy financing in our region.

In fact, many of the issues we have worked on for years have been dabbling in the arena of rural economic development, but we have stopped short of tackling the issue head on. Based on what we heard last year, the time has come to stop dabbling, roll up our sleeves, and get to work building an economic vision for Western Colorado through a community organizing process.

Thankfully, we are not alone in this work. From the coalfields of Appalachia to the inner city of Detroit, communities across the country are coming together to create diverse and resilient local economies that work for everyone. It is time for us to join this national conversation and bring a vision for “Homegrown Prosperity” in western Colorado, built from the ground up.

We will be kick-starting this conversation at our Annual Conference, Building Homegrown Prosperity, on August 25 with a series of workshops on rural economic development.

We are honored to welcome guest speaker Eric Dixon from the Appalachian Citizen Law Center to share stories from the heart of coal country as people work for a “just transition” in the face of a collapsing coal economy.

We hope you can join us in these conversations as we build our vision for diverse and resilient rural economies that work for all of us.

About the author

Emily Hornback

Emily stepped up as our staff director in 2017, but originally joined our team as a community organizer in 2013. Born and raised on the Western Slope, Emily graduated from Colorado State University and then had the privilege of learning from and working alongside organizers in Central and South America as well as Appalachian coal country. They returned to their home state to protect the land they love and work with fellow Coloradans for a healthy, just and self-reliant future for our rural communities. Emily enjoys organizing, exploring the Colorado Plateau, country music and punk concerts with equal passion.