For Cottonwood Institute (CI), 2016 has been a wildly successful year! CI coordinated 32 programs, served 391 students, delivered 18,163 program contact hours, and over 6,700 service learning project hours.

This would not have been possible without the support of generous donors who help CI connect underserved students to the outdoors and empower them to make change in their own lives and in their communities.

Such success calls for celebration, so on a pleasantly warm Wednesday evening in November 2016, friends of CI gathered to be honored for their part in making CI’s work possible in the Denver metro area and Boulder. Attendees sipped on delicious beer from Great Divide Brewing Company in their first-class canning warehouse, savored a variety of sliders courtesy of 5280 Sliders, and enjoyed each others company while tossing cornhole bags, playing table tennis, and chatting over wooden beer barrels.

Ford Church, Executive Director of Cottonwood Institute, shared an overview of the year’s successes and showed a sneak peek of CI’s new video created for CI by New Orleans Filmmaker, Miles Mumford. Paul Dreyer, longtime CI board member, presented the staff with sweet Patagonia down vests and thanked them for their hard work over the past year.

The staff and board of Cottonwood Institute would like to thank each and every one of their donors, sponsors, partners, instructors, and students for a wonderful year. Cheers to many more years of adventure, service, learning, and leadership to come!

A huge thanks to our sponsors who made this event possible, including: