Cottonwood Institute (CI) has been so grateful for our amazing partnership with Casa de la Esperanza (Casa) in Longmont, CO, for the past 13 years! This year, we decided to kick our collaboration up a notch by co-creating the Familias Unidas en la Naturaleza (FUN) Program, a new program to inspire youth and their… Read more »
Escrito en español más abajo. Written by Cottonwood Institute instructor M Tormasi. As the summer solstice neared, Cottonwood Institute instructors excitedly met up with folks from Casa de la Esperanza in Longmont. The camping trip ahead would include a no-lights-allowed night hike, a service project, and even meeting rescued wolves up close and personal. That’s… Read more »
Escrito en español más abajo. Written by Cottonwood Institute instructor Tucker Knight. See more photos here! A group of middle and high schoolers from the Casa de Esperanza program joined Cottonwood Institute for an adventure! The students were wrapping up a week-long program and concluded it with a hike and small celebration. It was a… Read more »
Written by CI Field Instructor Aileen Palma (Escrito en español más abajo) Time flies when you’re having fun…Erin and Aileen had the pleasure of working with a group of students from Casa de La Esperanza for a short two weeks before we geared up for a culminating day hike. Although the students grew up together, this didn’t… Read more »
Cottonwood Institute has always promoted a life of learning, loving, and living nature. This means disconnecting from our ever-connected devices and reconnecting to the natural world through all of our senses. We encourage our students to observe animal behaviors, to listen to whispers of the wind through the trees, to feel the texture of the… Read more »
The students from Casa de la Esperanza experienced a lot of new things this summer. For most of them, their camping trip with Cottonwood Institute in Rocky Mountain National Park was their first time camping or hiking. For some of these middle schoolers, it was their first time spending the night away from home. And… Read more »
It was already warm at 7:30am when the group started to trickle into the parking lot of Casa de la Esperanza for our adventure. Sleepiness mixed with excitement as we piled into the van for the four hour trip. Skyscrapers and billboards gave way to mountains and desert sage until we finally reached our destination:… Read more »
Do you realize how much of modern human life depends on tiny buzzing insects? Without bees many of our favorite foods would be gone or vastly more expensive. And it’s not even just fruit we’d be missing: even *gasp* chocolate and coffee would be at risk. And bee populations are declining at an alarming rate…. Read more »
Rushing creeks and energetic boys from Longmont’s Casa De La Esperanza housing community (Casa) crisscrossed the property of Beaver Ponds Environmental Education Center this summer. As part of CI’s Community Adventure Program (CAP), the boys explored the high-altitude evergreen forests, captured bugs, fed barnyard animals, spotted beavers, and made medicinal balms. At first glance, the swift… Read more »
Can’d Aid Foundation presents the Cottonwood Institute Community Adventure Program at Casa de la Esperanza. Even though it is a pressing issue on the Front Range, most people have never heard of the Emerald Ash Borer. Neither had the kids at Casa de la Esperanza until the fourth day of their two-week Community Adventure Program. When… Read more »
