Dear TRENDS Diary,I'm a member of CU's class of 2020—the COVID class. It has been almost a year since I left school wondering where I was headed and quite uncertain about where I would land. I recently talked with two friends, class of 2021, who shared familiar...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I grew up low-income in rural Oregon and felt the impact of not having reliable car transportation. After graduating high school, I went to a community college in Eugene, OR, and there was a bus system there. It was liberating to ride the bus....
Dear TRENDS Diary - Being a COVID epidemiologist is exciting in a weird way. Of course, I would never hope for a pandemic in a million years. But it is pretty neat to have finished my graduate degree a few years before it happened. It has validated that the work I do...
Dear TRENDS Diary,Last year was incredibly challenging for local businesses, and unfortunately those challenges have continued into 2021.In Nederland, every single business has felt the impact of COVID-19 – whether it be through mandatory closures, modifying their...
Dear TRENDS Diary,I’m a retired healthcare worker and small business owner [The Shop, theshopned.com] in the mountain community of Nederland. I was busy preparing for a festive Frozen Dead Guy Days weekend last March when we went into the shutdown.A small group of...
An artist's reflection on confronting hate. Dear TRENDS Diary, Part of building an equitable future is getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Recently, a mural I was commissioned to paint on the Pearl Street Mall was defaced with white...
Dear TRENDS Diary - It's been a dream of mine, for a long time, to be able to share my passion and joy for making things and its ability to turn nearly every problem into something any of us might solve. I've tried a lot of different places and different...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I started making digital illustrations as a creative outlet in 2017. I just needed some place to vent. I hated my job at the time, but I also didn’t have a lot of job mobility because I’m on a visa. I can’t just leave a company because I need to...
"As an industry, there’s a lot of talk about inclusivity. But we figured we can do better when it comes to putting our money where our hearts are." Dear TRENDS Diary, As a co-owners of a Longmont tap room, my husband and I have a modest platform to inspire people...
El mensaje que sigue es en españolDear TRENDS diary,My name is Jose Garcia Madrid and I am the LGBTQ Program Coordinator for OUT Boulder County. When the pandemic started, some of the groups inside the LGBTQ community, which is very diverse, were more affected than...
Dear TRENDS Diary,As a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Colorado-Boulder, and a member of the CU employee union, it’s difficult trying to figure out how to help people in the most effective way possible.The Union right now is mostly graduate workers,...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I’m a 45-year-old, married father of two. I go on long bike rides almost every day from our Boulder home. Lots of my friends are curious how someone as healthy as me got COVID, and why it lasted so long. My wife and I and our kids were careful. Yet,...
Dear TRENDS Diary - As I settled into my new home in Lyons five years ago and began to meet new friends and neighbors, I was struck by how people marked time with “before” and “after.” I realized they were referring to the historic flood that devastated the town...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I am fortunate to be pastor at the Light of Christ Ecumenical Catholic Community. We’re an independent group that experiences God with many of the “smells and bells” of traditional Catholic services, but we also practice “radical inclusion,” opening...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I run the Outback Saloon in Boulder. I’d like to share my story so that more people take this virus seriously.Way back in March, I got the chills, then a fever, due to COVID-19. Urgent Care wouldn’t test me at first because I didn’t have chest pains...
Dear TRENDS Diary -Each week for nearly 20 years, I have helped put on a free-form community dance gathering, called Conscious Dance Boulder. Until March, we rented space every Thursday night at Alchemy of Movement, a local dance studio, creating a habitat there for...
Dear TRENDS Diary - The mission of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless is to create avenues to stable housing for our community’s homeless adults, from a foundation of supportive and safe shelter. COVID-19 has challenged us to reexamine what it means to offer...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I grew up in Ghana, and music began for me through church activities. When I was in college, I traveled to Minneapolis with an a cappella group, and after college I moved to the US to record and perform as a musician. I went back to graduate school...
Dear TRENDS Diary -In April, I did a Zoom happy hour with my sister Robin and two of our close colleagues at the Boulder International Film Festival. We were catching up after a few long weeks of quarantine, when somebody mentioned drive-in movies. At the same time,...
Dear TRENDS Diary -I’m a reference librarian at the Longmont Public Library. Under normal circumstances, I curate the book collections, oversee in-house programs and help visitors at the reference desk.When the pandemic forced us to close on March 13, the normal...