Telluride Foundation 2020 Impact Report

• SPECIAL EDITION IMPACT REPORT •

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF MAKING MORE POSSIBLE

INSIDE IMPACT INITIATIVES HISTORY OF THE FOUNDATION KIDS PREDICT THE FUTURE

REWIND Our past, formed by tenacious, resilient individuals, tells a relevant story for today; our stories connect us to our future, reminding us of our potential and our values and helping us address our current challenges.

The Smuggler-Union Tram.

(Photo courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum)

WH AT ’ S I N S I D E

10

20 YEARS OF MAKING MORE POSSIBLE

IMPACT INITIATIVES

06

History of the Telluride Foundation

20

Making An Impact

08

A Letter From Our Leadership

22

Broadband Expansion

10

Telluride Foundation Milestones

24

Local Food

26

Workforce Development

28

Strong Neighbors

30

Telluride Venture Accelerator

32

College Scholarships

34

Tri-County Health Network

36

Immigrant Integration

HOW WE DO OUR WORK

14

12

Thinking Outside the Box (Canyon)

14

Building Capacity

15

Thought Leadership

16

Tackling Difficult Issues

17

Measuring Our Impact

18

Honoring Local Heroes

FEATURES 38

38

From Tesla to Tourism to TVA

50

Knitting a New Safety Net

64

Growing Local

64

An odyssey of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Benevolence and philanthropy in the San Juans.

Explorations in our past and future foodshed.

Paul Major President & CEO

PERSPECTIVE 88

The Future of the Region

90

Reflections on the Foundation

91

Q&A with Tavares Strachan

92

Kids Predict the Future

94

Fast Forward

How Our Work is Funded

76

Community Grants

78

Foundation Financials

Telluride Foundation

Elaine Demas Vice President of Initiatives Katie Singer Marketing & Donor Relations Director Erika Lapsys Programs Director Valene Baskfield Chang Chavkin Scholars Director Robin Kondracki Strong Neighbors Coordinator (AmeriCorps VISTA, 2020-2021) David Bruce Housing Initiative Coordinator (Rose Architectural Fellow 2020-2022)

Susie Schaefer Finance Director

24

Alex Barry Controller Bonnie Watson Capital & Transaction Advisor Carla Reams Skillful West End Manager

82 Recognition 84

April Montgomery Vice President of Programs

ASSOCIATES

IN FOCUS 74

FOUNDATION STAFF

In Memoriam

• 4 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Telluride Foundation

• 5 • 20th Anniversary Issue

20 YEA RS O F M A K I N G M O R E P OS S I B L E

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

because of the Telluride Foundation, there is a safety-net for people in need, there are scholarships for kids going to college and participating in after-school programs, and there are efforts to help diversify the economy and increase jobs and opportunities in our neighboring communities.

HISTORY OF THE

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION The first or second week after I arrived in Telluride in 1978, the only remaining local bank president came to my office to tell me they were closing. Later that month a group of locals arrived in my office to ask me to help save the Telluride Film Festival, which was having financial difficulties and considering closing.

By RON ALLRED

Those were the economic realities of Telluride back then.

However, I saw the mountains, the scenery, and the quaint, charming Town of Telluride, and a great potential for the future. I realized how special the community was.

Isn’t that what people say? “I came for the mountains, but stayed for the community.” It was that passion for the community that got me thinking about how to build on what makes Telluride so special.

By 2000, Telluride’s rich depth of community organizations were prospering. It had a 100-yearold opera house, 30-year-old film and music festivals, an adaptive sports program, and a strong network of social service

Telluride Foundation

I see now, 20 years later, how an idea (and some good luck) has had such an impact on so many lives.

programs to help people in need.

I started talking to my friends and business partners about my idea of starting a foundation (I had a lot of golf course conversations in those days) to support what we had and what we aspired toward. I got lucky in meeting Norman Schwarzkopf, who agreed to join the board. With Schwarzkopf’s help, it didn’t take long before I had a commitment from 13 people who each contributed $100,000 to seed a foundation; these 13 were recognized as “Friends of Telluride.” That was the birth of the Telluride Foundation.

It’s nice to look back and reflect a bit on our successes. However, the work isn’t done; nor will it ever be, and that’s exactly why the Telluride Foundation needs to continue to exist. I’m confident, with a little help from all our friends, that it will.

I again got lucky in hiring Paul Major as the first President and CEO. Under Paul’s leadership, as well as strong, committed board members and dedicated staff, the Telluride Foundation has kept its original vision alive and has leveraged our initial contributions to more than $60 million in support of the region.

(Top) The installation of the gondola in 1996 was a major milestone in the development of the Telluride Ski Resort.

(Middle Left) Norman Schwarzkopf, Founding Co-Chair of the Telluride Foundation.

(Middle Right) Ron Allred, Founding Co-Chair of the Telluride Foundation.

When people ask me about my involvement in the region and what I’m proudest of, they might assume it’s building a world-class ski resort. In actuality, it’s knowing that

• 6 • 20th Anniversary Issue

(Bottom) “Friends of Telluride” helped launch the Telluride Foundation.

Telluride Foundation

• 7 • 20th Anniversary Issue

20 YEA RS O F M A K I N G M O R E P OS S I B L E

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Photo by Elevation Imaging

LETTER FROM THE

robust and vibrant arts community, addressing food insecurity, ensuring a strong human service safety net, or strengthening our regional economy.

In addition to the Telluride Foundation donors who make everything we do possible,we extend a special thanks to the 20th Anniversary Fund hosts and supporters. The 20th Anniversary Fund allows us to create events and programs to thank donors, celebrate our community and nonprofits, unveil new projects, and launch new initiatives. Host donors include: Mike & Anne Armstrong, Joanne & Harmon Brown, Arnie Chavkin & Laura Chang, Mark & Susan Dalton, Tully & Elise Friedman, Jeff Katz, Adam & Diane Max, Chris & Laura Pucillo, Howard & Debbie Schiller, and Dan & Sheryl Tishman.

By DANIEL TISHMAN

Chairman, Board of Directors

By PAUL MAJOR

President & CEO

As Yogi Berra said so well, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

How are we positioned for the future? Are we up for the challenges of ever increasing complexity and ambiguity? The very nature of our work is to attack the problems we face today so as to create a better future for the people in our community. As we think about our approach for the next 20 years, we know we will continue to identify and leverage new resources and bestin-class, innovative methodologies while demonstrating results through measurable outcomes.

HOUSING is the critical issue of our time, and one we must address

Telluride Foundation

to ensure thriving communities in the future. The challenge is not unique to Telluride but exists across the entire region in which we serve. We are now on the verge of launching a rural workforce housing initiative, which we will pilot in neighboring communities and could become a model across the state. The tenacity and outcomedriven perseverance required to tackle an issue as complex and challenging as affordable housing is in the Foundation’s DNA. Our 20th Anniversary also compels us to think about our diverse COMMUNITY and the PEOPLE we serve. Bringing our diverse community together, from Telluride to the West End, from local workers to part time homeowners, from old-time families to immigrants, and ensuring all feel welcome and supported is our focus, and will only become more challenging as our community grows. In one way or another, the Telluride Foundation touches everyone in this community, whether that’s through funding afterschool and early childhood education programs, supporting a

• 8 • 20th Anniversary Issue

We welcome you to join us on this anniversary journey and in supporting our local communities, as every additional dollar we raise goes, 100 percent, into Making More Possible – here, now, and tomorrow.

Thank you, Dan & Paul

Photo by Aurelie Sleggers

Our 20th Anniversary allows us to reflect on how we have met community challenges and embraced opportunities. This year is not just a reflection on 20 years of accomplishments and donor generosity, but also a time to imagine the FUTURE.

Photo by Aurelie Sleggers

CHAIRMAN AND PRESIDENT & CEO

(Top) Rundola participants help each other reach the top.

(Middle)Local medical professionals benefit from Broadband improvements.

(Bottom) Lone Cone Library patrons enjoy high-speed internet.

Telluride Foundation

• 9 • 20th Anniversary Issue

20 YEA RS O F M A K I N G M O R E P OS S I B L E

“Telluride Gives,” a social media giving platform to support nonprofits Awarded first “Energy Outreach” grants to pay the power bills for citizens in need

2000

Ron Allred & Joe Morita established the Telluride Foundation General Norman Schwarzkopf joined Ron Allred as Board of Directors Co-chair 2001

First Community Grants awarded to over 50 nonprofits Capacity-building workshops for nonprofits initiated 2002

Early Childhood Initiative established, increasing access to affordable, quality childcare

Partnered with Mountain Village to host Primal Quest Telluride 360 Adventure Festival 2003

Good Neighbor Fund, a family safety net program created Hosted the first “Operation F.E.A.S.T” to raise funds for the Telluride Medical Center

Program launched 2005

Latino Initiative for a stronger and more inclusive community began Early Childhood Initiative became a stand-alone nonprofit, Bright Futures for Early Childhood & Families 2006

First Citizen of the Year awarded to Terry Tice

Special Initiative Grants established to enable the funding of nonprofit capital campaigns

2004

Fundraising for Telluride Hanley Ice Rink spearheaded Regional College Scholarship

First capital grant awarded to new Naturita public library Healthcare

Telluride Foundation

Initiative implemented to improve access to healthcare in the region 2007

San Juan Cavity Prevention Program launched, offering free dental care in regional schools Special Initiative Grants awarded to San Miguel Resource Center for permanent office space and to Trust for Land Restoration for public access to Wilson Peak Hosted the National Economic Summit on Investment in Early Childhood Education

2008

One Telluride, an immigrant integration initiative, established Special Initiative Grant awarded to Mountain Munchkins to fund a new preschool in Mountain Village 2009

Forever Telluride launched with a bequest from founding board member Steven Wald First AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteer in Service to America) hired Received “American Recovery & Reinvestment

• 10 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Act” grant to support nonprofits in their economic recovery effort 2010

Alternative Futures Scenarios analysis conducted to understand transportation, housing, and development issues in the region Awarded over $1M in grants during the Foundation’s 10th Anniversary year 2011

The inaugural 4th of July RunDola foot race held Hosted the first

2012

Neil Armstrong Scholarship Fund established, offering college scholarships to students pursuing a degree in science Telluride Venture Accelerator (TVA) launched Received USDA grant to create endowment funds in Rico, Norwood, and the West End 2013

First cohort of entrepreneurs graduated from TVA; all received investment dollars Received the National Housing & Urban Development’s

“Secretary’s Award for Community Foundations”

to the region STEM Teacher Professional Development Initiative created

2014

Health Initiative became a standalone nonprofit -- Tri-County Health Network West End Seniors’ Collaborative established to coordinate and fund senior programs First Affordable Housing Initiative launched to increase workforce housing 2015

Special Initiative Grants awarded to Paradox Valley Charter School to purchase a bus and to West End Economic Development Corporation to fund a commercial kitchen Broadband Initiative launched to bring high speed internet

2016

Hosted the “Innovation Prize Contest,” promoting ideas to improve the region Local Food Initiative launched to improve the regional food economy and decrease food insecurity Facilitated the Colorado Foundation’s Water Retreat 2017

Chang Chavkin Scholars Program initiated to support firstgeneration students in five regional school districts Helped fund the “Alliance for Inclusion” to support the Latinx community Broadband

Telluride Foundation

Initiative receives federal grant to connect Nucla to Telluride with high-speed broadband service 2018

Hosted the first regional trails meeting to support collaboration on trail development “Telluride Works,” coworking space in downtown Telluride, opened Partnered with the Markle Foundation to create a Workforce Development Initiative in the West End, assisting individuals experiencing job losses due to decreases in coal production President & CEO, Paul Major, received Colorado Governor’s Citizenship Award for Innovation West End

“Backpack Program” began, providing children with food over threeday weekends Awarded federal grant to support economic development in the West End Staff received “Silver Tongue” Award for raising the most money during KOTO community radio “Women Who Rock” contest Hired a Capital & Transaction Advisor to support rural entrepreneurs with loan and investment opportunities 2019

Celebrated awarding over $60,000,000 in grant and initiative funding since our inception Two board of director seats added for regional nonprofit leaders

• 11 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Enterprise Outcomes adopted to help measure the impact of the Foundation’s work High School Apprenticeship Program expanded from the West End to Norwood schools 2020

20th Anniversary celebrations postponed due to COVID-19 COVID-19 Response Fund established to provide financial support to the region’s most vulnerable families and to nonprofits providing essential services New Regional Workforce Housing Initiative launched

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

HOW WE DO OUR WORK

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX (CANYON) 1776

Dominguez-Escalante expedition travels through Ute territory, present-day San Miguel, Montrose & Ouray counties

1811

1870

American fur trappers encounter Ute Indians in the San Juan Mountains

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

Telluride Valley used as summer camp for Ute Indians

he Telluride Foundation brings together the thought leadership necessary to develop innovative approaches to tackle tough issues. We believe in strengthening the capacity and resiliency of the organizations and individuals we serve, in order to support strong, sustainable communities throughout our service region.

Through it all, we keep our values front and center – promoting inclusion, building self-reliance, and being a change agent.

T

1870

Ute Indians, led by Chief Ouray, inhabit Uncompahgre Valley, with plentiful game & natural hot springs

1872

1872 Mining Act signed into law, creating the silver & gold rush in the San Juan Mountains

Telluride Foundation

1873

• 13 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Utes cede San Juan mining area to U.S. and are driven out of San Juan Mountains

HOW W E D O O U R WOR K

T Thought Leadership

How We Turn Innovative Ideas Into Reality

Building Capacity It’s Not Just About Giving Away Money

A

t the Telluride Foundation, we emphasize building the capacity of programs and organizations. It’s not just about giving away money. That money needs to be paired with a commitment to nurture the capacity of organizations and programs to ensure that they can be as successful and sustainable as possible.

With that in mind, the Foundation provides continuous opportunities for training and learning. We host workshops and Executive Director Breakfasts throughout the year and consult one-onone with many organizations to provide advice on financials, capital campaigns, strategy, and more.

When it comes to our own

1875

1876

Valuable ore discovered in the San Juan mountains, containing zinc, copper, silver lead, and gold

Telluride

West End

From multi-year efforts to one-day convenings, from business leader summits on early childhood investment to a Colorado foundations water retreat, the Foundation has led multiple endeavors to inspire philanthropic, government, business, and community leaders to turn innovative ideas into reality.

initiatives, we aim to provide that same level of attention and support, encouraging them to be successful and – if appropriate – sustainable independent nonprofits.

Our Strong Neighbors Initiative is now a model for other rural communities, providing a multifaceted approach to building community resiliency. Major now serves on the Colorado Just Transition Advisory Committee, helping Colorado better serve coal-impacted communities.

We are especially proud of two programs launched by the Foundation that are now operating as thriving independent nonprofits and essential service organizations to the region: Bright Futures for Early Childhood and Families and Tri-County Health Network.

Both are important partners to the Foundation, collaborating with us to achieve mutual goals of meeting the critical healthcare and childcare needs of lower income families in the region.

Town of Ouray is incorporated, as miners move into area in search of valuable ore

Ouray County

1878

Mining camp, originally named “Columbia,” becomes Town of Telluride

he Telluride Foundation has a history of thinking outside of the box canyon and bringing thought leaders and decision makers together to help solve many of the challenges our communities face. We are always looking for new ways to tackle community problems or to get out in front of potential issues; it is no wonder that Foundation President and CEO Paul Major was awarded the Governor’s Citizenship Medal for Growth and Innovation.

The Foundation has become a national leader in creating support networks for business start-ups, innovation, and entrepreneurs in an effort to diversify resort economies in remote mountain towns.

1882

Yankee Girl Mine discovered in Red Mtn. Mining District; District will provide $30M+ in silver/gold

1883

Otto Mears completes toll road connecting Red Mtn. Mining District to Ouray

Telluride Foundation

1886

• 15 • 20th Anniversary Issue

First pioneer family, the Josephs, settle on Wright’s Mesa near Norwood

HOW W E D O O U R WOR K

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capacity, from planning to property management. Project costs can be more than 40% higher than completed appraised values – driving up sales prices and rents. In addition, demand exceeds supply for affordable homes, and housing is often old, dilapidated, and unsafe.

Recognizing this complex issue, the Foundation launched its “Rural Workforce Housing Initiative” in 2020, exemplifying its commitment to addressing community needs and its willingness to take on complex challenges.

Tackling Difficult Issues

Affordable Housing: The Challenge of Our Time

A

s the Telluride Foundation sought to improve the quality of life for our rural region’s residents, visitors, and workforce over the years, the lack of affordable housing continued to emerge as a critical gap in every community and every sector the Foundation touched.

Like much of the country, southwestern Colorado faces an affordable housing crisis, which is particularly acute in rural areas.

Developing affordable rural projects in rural areas is often infeasible due to higher construction costs, low rents, inability to compete for capital, and lack of development

1886

1886

Railroad comes to Ouray, bringing economic growth & increasing population to over 2,500

West End

Program Evaluation Embedded in Everything We Do

Ouray County

1888

Ouray County Courthouse and Wright Opera House constructed in Ouray

All our programs and initiatives are facilitated by one common thought: you can’t determine if you met your desired outcomes if you don’t measure them.

Therefore, measurement and evaluation are integrated into everything we do.

The Foundation has rolled up its sleeves to help address impediments to affordable housing construction in rural areas: capacity, scalability, financing, and construction.

The Foundation has formed a coalition of statewide partners to create a replicable model, which empowers rural communities to build affordable housing at scale for their teachers, working families, and lower income residents to improve community health, wellbeing, and economic resilience.

The coalition plans to pilot this model in rural communities in southwestern Colorado.

Beaumont Hotel is constructed in Ouray

Telluride

Measuring Our Impact

he Telluride Foundation believes that our donors need to see how their contributions are making a difference in the community. We work hard to explain how the money we invest, in either grants or initiatives, improves peoples’ lives and makes a measurable impact.

Working alongside our regional nonprofits, the Foundation has developed grant outcomes and indicators to measure the impact of our Community Grants. In addition, every initiative launched by the Foundation has accompanying desired outcomes; whether measuring the improvement in specific health indicators for our Food Rx Program participants or the average decrease in the cost of broadband service following our Broadband Initiative, we are continuously and tenaciously measuring the impact of our work.

1889

Butch Cassidy and Wild Bunch steal $24,000 from San Miguel National Bank in Telluride

1890

Carnotite (ore with radium, vanadium, and uranium) discovered in the West End

Telluride Foundation

1890

• 17 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Town of Ridgway, named after Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Superintendent Robert Ridgway, incorporated

HOW W E D O O U R WOR K

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eeding the hungry. Taking in at-risk youth. Finding funding for those that need help. Never giving up. These are some of the selfless acts that Telluride’s “Citizens of the Year” do every day without expecting anything in return. The Telluride Foundation created its Citizen of the Year award to honor individuals who unselfishly make extraordinary contributions to the region’s quality of life.

Honoring Local Heroes Extraordinary Volunteers Make Our Community a Better Place

(Opposite) Barb Gross, 2019 Citizen of the Year.

(Far Left) John Pryor, 2007 Citizen of the Year.

(Left) Susan Rice receives her award in 2018.

Photo by Makaela Vodopich, Desert Snow Photography

Nominations are solicited from community members in recognition of exemplary community service and volunteerism.

PAST RECIPIENTS

Citizens of the Year

Railroad comes to Telluride; town grows into a largely immigrant community of 5,000

1890

Congress passes Sherman Silver Purchase Act, agreeing to buy silver for coinage

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

1891

Ames Hydroelectric Plant powers Gold King Mine & serves as demonstration of alternating current power

2014

Marilyn Branch

Kristin Holbrook

2010

2004

Recent recipients include Barb Gross, who makes sure the pantry at the Telluride Food Bank is always stocked and that children who otherwise might go hungry have a full meal, and Naturita Library Director Susan Rice, who advocates for food, shelter, and support for youth in the West End.

Lissa Margetts 2005

John Micetic

2015

Dan & Greer Garner, Andrea Benda

Gary Freedman

2011

Elaine Fischer

2012

Wendy Brooks

2013

Susan Rice

2016

Billy “Senior” Mahoney

2006

Bill Carstens

2017

Anne Brady

2007

John Pryor, Jane Hickcox

Each Citizen of the Year receives a commemorative plaque and a grant of $5,000 to be given in their name to the local nonprofit of their choice.

1890

2009

2003

Terry Tice

2018

Dean Rolley

2008

2019

Barb Gross

Kathy Green

1891

Hanging Flume, above San Miguel River, completed for hydraulic gold mining, although soon abandoned

1893

Repeal of Sherman Silver Purchase Act, leads to crash in silver prices and blow to region’s mining economy

Telluride Foundation

1893

• 19 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Colorado Cooperative Company established socialist colony, Piñon, which became Town of Nucla

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

IMPACT INITIATIVES

MAKING OUR IMPACT

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

rom bolstering and diversifying the regional economy to bringing broadband service to the area, the Telluride Foundation’s Impact Initiatives focus on innovative and creative solutions to our communities’ most critical and unmet needs.

Executing our own Impact Initiatives allows us to attack community challenges with an all-in approach and positions the Telluride Foundation at the forefront of philanthropic innovation.

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Telluride Foundation

• 21 • 20th Anniversary Issue

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

Photos by Aurelie Sleggers

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

2019 was a busy, successful year.

A new fiber line was completed from Nucla to Norwood, providing high-speed fiber access to the Uncompahgre Medical Center, Lone Cone Library, and the public schools, as well as some Norwood businesses and residents. In Telluride, the Telluride Medical Center, Wilkinson Public Library, and public schools were also “lit up” with gigabit service, allowing for telehealth options and uninterrupted video conferencing capabilities. Many Telluride residents and businesses are currently getting connected to fiber.

1

B R OA DBAND E XPA NS ION

Fiber installation along the stretch of Highway 145, from Society Turn into Telluride known as the “Spur” is in i ts final construction phase and will be in use before school begins fall 2020. The existing Tri-State fiber that runs between Norwood and Ilium Valley completes the regional fiber network and allows for redundancy and reliability between Nucla and Telluride.

2020 & BEYOND

This successful regional collaboration is laser-focused on creating a market-priced, high-speed, redundant, and reliable broadband network in west Montrose and San Miguel counties to support economic development, education, healthcare, and public safety access and activities.

(Above) Matt Stott, Norwood Fire District, uses highspeed internet to respond to emergencies.

(Top Right) Norwood EMT is dependent on reliable internet to save lives.

(Bottom Right) A Norwood student accesses high speed broadband for school.

1893

Telluride’s population dwindles from thousands to hundreds as the mining economy shrinks

1896

Camp Bird Mine, established by Thomas Walsh, produced over $26M in gold from 1896 to 1910

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

1904

Governor Peabody calls in National Guard, building Fort Peabody at Imogene Pass to counter miners’ labor strike

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

Broadband access in our rural region kept emerging as a critical gap in every sector the Foundation touched, so we leveraged our skills in project management, partnership coordination, and fundraising to do something about

it. By covering the heavy costs of backbone fiber infrastructure, the Telluride Foundation has eliminated the barriers to entry for internet service providers, who are now competing for customers in the region and offering better service and lower prices.

1914

1924

Standard Chemical Co. builds Joe Jr. Mill to process radioactive ore, beginning industry in region

“Million Dollar Highway,” connecting Ouray to Silverton, is paved, opening up tourism opportunities.

Telluride Foundation

With the successful completion of fiber infrastructure, we will begin seeing the fruits of these efforts as the years unfold: a more competitive marketplace for internet providers, increased economic development opportunities, and expanded educational and healthcare services will now be within reach for everyone living and working in our region.

1927

• 23 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Ouray Hot Springs Pool opens

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

1936

US Vanadium Corp. begins production of uranium for WWII Manhattan Project at Town of Uravan

Photo by Aurelie Sleggers

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

A new distribution, sales, and marketing system for regional farmers has been established, and a new community grain mill was recently purchased. Food banks in the region are active and busy, serving community members that need help putting healthy food on the table.

Through the Food Rx Program, community members are improving their health with fresh food and nutrition education.

2020 & BEYOND

The Foundation, in partnership with San Miguel County, is conducting a feasibility study in 2020 to evaluate the potential of opening a local meat processing facility. Also, the Foundation recently received a “Strengthening Community Food Systems” implementation grant from the Colorado Health Foundation.

This funding will help us improve the overall sustainability of all of our food security programs.

Our work has not only significantly Photo by Aurelie Sleggers

Our Local Food Initiative focuses on strengthening the West End’s historic agricultural ecosystem to encourage a more diverse, sustainable economy, while providing fresher, more nutrient-rich food to neighboring communities – particularly for those who struggle to afford such food.

The Telluride Foundation and our partners in the West End actively collaborate on a number of programs.

increased access to affordable healthy food but has also reintroduced locally grown fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats from western San Miguel and Montrose counties to the entire region.

Photo Courtesy of Apple Core Project

LO CAL FOOD

2

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

(Top) Basket of items from the Fresh Food Hub. (Far Left) Apple Core Festival in Nucla.

(Left) Mesa Owen and Leila Seraphin working at the Fresh Food Hub.

1940

Idarado Mine near Ouray and Telluride develops lead and zinc production to meet metal demands of WWII

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

1942

“WSP” Mill built in Uravan to process uranium

1959

Nucla Station coal-fired power plant constructed

1964

Telluride Historic District listed on National Register of Historic Places

Telluride Foundation

1966

• 25 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Rimrocker Historical Society founded in Naturita to honor region’s history

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

(Far Left) Skillful Coach works with excoal mine employee to obtain a new job with Montrose County (Nucla Shop) as a heavy equipment operator.

3

John Wayne’s western movie, “True Grit,” filmed in Ridgway, Ouray and Cimarron Mountains

1972

(Bottom) Skillful works with businesses, educators, and government to help the nearly 70% of Americans without college degrees get good jobs based on the skills they have or the skills they can learn.

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

The Telluride Foundation leverages financial support and coordinates the resources and relationships to effect meaningful change in the job market of our region.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

In the fall of 2018, in partnership with the Markle Foundation, the Telluride Foundation launched the first rural pilot of “Skillful” in the West End of Montrose County. “Skillful-West End” seeks to change hiring practices of regional employers to focus on a job seeker’s skills versus traditional credentials-based practices.

Through one-on-one coaching, we also help job seekers identify the skills they currently possess or lack and provide opportunities for them to obtain additional skills so they can qualify for well-paying jobs within the region.

West End

2020 & BEYOND

As the workforce climate in our region continues to evolve, we will remain engaged with regional employers, schools, and job seekers to support the region’s ever-changing economy.

1974

Telluride Ski Resort officially opens

Telluride

Through funding, resource coordination, and oversight, the Foundation also supports the West End and Norwood school districts’ Apprenticeship Programs. These Programs provide students with foundational workforce experience and credit toward certifications and/or college.

Photo Courtesy of Skillful, a Markle initiative

WORKFORCE DEV ELOPMEN T

Our Workforce Development Initiative seeks to help West End communities counter the loss of coal-related jobs by providing skills-based training and job seeking services to adults as well as to highschool students.

1968

(Left) Skillful was in attendance at the West End Community Career Fair & Job Expo to provide assistance with the application process.

Ouray County

1st Telluride Bluegrass Festival attracts 1,000 participants & 1st Telluride Film Festival occurs at Sheridan Opera House

1975

Ridgway dubbed “Town that Refused to Die” after decision to build dam lower on river, not inundating town

1978

Idarado Mine closes due to low metal prices

Telluride Foundation

1978

• 27 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Ron Allred & Jim Wells purchase Telluride Ski Area, launching vision of world-class ski resort

(Pictured) Norwood kids display their new skills after Wide Sky Arts Collective mural painting workshop.

4

STRONG N E I GHBORS A locally-driven, all-in approach to spark prosperity in isolated neighboring “frontier” communities whose economies are in transition.

1979

Basin Medical Clinic opens in Naturita; Montrose West Recreation established

1983

Colorado sues Idarado Mining Co. for pollution, eventually leading to a Superfund cleanup

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

1985

1st commercial airline service makes flights available to and from Telluride Airport

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

This umbrella initiative covers many of the Foundation’s programs and initiatives serving the west end of San Miguel and Montrose counties, as well as the Town of Rico. The Foundation’s leadership, resources, and deep community relationships, combined with grants, initiatives, and investments, are helping these neighboring communities transition from 100-plus years of boom-andbust extractive industries to thriving, diversified economies. Our strategy focuses on a number of resiliency factors identified in a 2016 “Rural Economic Resiliency in Colorado”

1986

Town of Uravan closes Dec. 31 and becomes $70M reclamation Superfund site

study. These factors include quality of life, industry diversity, community leadership, education, healthcare, and affordable housing.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

We have provided technical assistance and investment support to three community endowment groups (Rico, Norwood, and Nucla/ Naturita), encouraging community philanthropy. Through a $1.6 million federal grant, we help fund WEEDC (West End Economic Development Corp.), which provides resources to new and existing businesses in the region. The Foundation has

1993

New Horizon Mine near Nucla begins coal mining operations in the area

Telluride Foundation

leveraged philanthropy to support and maximize Opportunity Zone investments in the region and serves as a regional point of contact, helping to match businesses with investors and loan capital. We have also facilitated a regional trails and recreational effort.

2020 AND BEYOND

The Foundation will continue to support and partner with our neighboring communities, with a focus on building leadership capacity and honoring our neighbors’ self-determined priorities.

1996

• 29 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Gondola links Mountain Village and Telluride with free transportation, the first of its kind in the U.S.

Photo by Harvey Mogenson

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

Now in its seventh year, the Telluride Venture Accelerator encourages ambitious entrepreneurs to come together to participate in a bootcamp-driven accelerator program.

VENTURE ACCELERATOR

5

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

(Top) One-on one conversations with mentors at the Sheridan Opera House.

(Middle) Telluride community seated at the Sheridan Opera House to watch Demo Day. (Bottom) Investors engage entrepreneurs during Demo Day. (Opposite) Investment Bootcamp cohort, 2019, with former TVA Program Director Ashley Nager (at right).

1997

Ouray Ice Park established, becoming a mainstay of Ouray’s winter economy

2000

2001

Telluride Foundation established and raises $4 million in its first year

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

Second Chance Animal Humane Society receives Telluride Foundation grant as first group of grantees

Telluride Venture Accelerator (TVA) represents a significant aspect of our work to help strengthen and diversify the regional economy. TVA offers four specific bootcamps to support budding entrepreneurs every year and provides access to an incredible network of business mentors, investors, and industry leading experts from across the country.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Thus far, 50 companies have graduated from a TVA bootcamp, and 86 percent of these companies are still active. TVA has created 138 full-time and 35 parttime jobs, including 11 full-time jobs in Telluride. TVA alumni companies represent a $126 million portfolio valuation. TVA owns, on average, 4 percent of most of

2002

Telluride Foundation establishes Bright Futures, a fund supporting early childhood care and education

2003

these companies. Since its inception, TVA has hosted 23 “Meetup” events, two “Startup Weekend” events, and four “Telluride Angels” events to help connect entrepreneurs with the funding they need to grow their businesses.

2020 AND BEYOND

In the future, TVA plans to continue its comprehensive, coordinated slate of interventions to promote rural entrepreneurs. These interventions include business support, incubation, and educational opportunities in the West End; TVA Bootcamps and mentorship; and the expert services of a capital and transaction advisor who matches businesses with capital and investors.

The Foundation has also worked with other funders to create $2 million in lending capital that matches the unique needs of early-stage and rural-based companies.

Telluride Foundation establishes Good Neighbor Fund to assist locals in financial crisis

Telluride Foundation

2004

• 31 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Hanley Ice Rink completed after major community-wide fundraising effort

Photo by Brenda Colwell

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

6

(Left) Neil Armstrong Scholarship Recipient, Slator Alpine with Scholarship founder, Carol Armstrong.

CO LLEGE S CH O LARS HIPS For the past 20 years, the Telluride Foundation has proudly supported regional youth pursuing higher education. Presently, four scholarship programs recognize students in the five school districts within our service area – Telluride, Ridgway, Ouray, Norwood, and the West End.

In 2017, the Foundation launched

the Chang Chavkin Scholars Program to increase the success of rural firstgeneration students throughout our region. Students are selected as Chang Chavkin Scholars in their junior year of high school. Scholars are then supported through the college application process as well as through four years of college. Currently, 12 Chang Chavkin Scholars are attending

2007

2007

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

Our staff works closely with donors who underwrite each of these scholarship programs, providing administrative support to ensure the donors’ vision for each program is accomplished.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Telluride Foundation awards capital grant to help build new Naturita Public Library

college. Each scholar has received on average $30,000 per year toward their education. In 2019, the program expanded to include students in the Montrose School District.

The Neil Armstrong Scholarship is awarded to students pursuing college degrees in STEM fields.

Seven scholars to date have each

570-acre Telluride Valley Floor purchased for $50 million

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

2008

Economic recession impacts Telluride economy; real estate, tourism, and construction industries shrink significantly

The Telluride Foundation Scholarship is awarded annually to one student from each of the five school districts within our service region. Applicants are selected by each school district’s administrative staff. This support may be used for college or trade school tuition.

The Strokes of Genius Scholarship, awarded to Telluride High School seniors demonstrating financial need, academic excellence, exceptional character, community involvement, and leadership potential is now administered by the Foundation as well. This program has been awarding college scholarships to Telluride youth for 25 years.

2010

2011

received a $20,000 scholarship.

Telluride Foundation distributes over $1M in community grants despite economic downturn

Naturita Library wins “Best Small Library in America” award

Telluride Foundation

2020 AND BEYOND

With the rising cost of college tuition, the Foundation is proud to be the largest funder of college scholarships in the region. We work closely with the five school districts within our service area, looking for opportunities to provide our regional youth with every advantage as they enter the next phase of their lives.

2012

• 33 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Telluride Venture Accelerator launched by the Telluride Foundation

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

TRI- COUNTRY HE AL TH NETWO RK

7

Originally the “healthcare arm” of the Telluride Foundation, TCHNetwork was created in 2008 to improve the overall quality of healthcare in its service area by reforming the region’s healthcare delivery system and eliminating barriers to care, while also providing solutions to meet critical healthcare needs.

2013

Ridgway becomes state-certified Creative District

2013

(Left) Tri-County Health Network staff, promoting participation in the 2020 Census.

TCHNetwork manages 32 community programs that focus on innovative solutions to the health-related challenges of living in rural regions.

West End

(Bottom Right) Child receives dental services through the Skippy Dental Program.

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

The Foundation and TCHNetwork often collaborate on programs and initiatives, including services for immigrants, transportation and food insecurity.

West End Econ. Dev. Corp. (WEEDC) established, supporting economic development in the West End

Telluride

(Top Right) All Smiles during the Skippy Dental Program.

Ouray County

2014

Rockfall closes Red Mountain Pass for weeks, prompting Ouray mayor to declare economic emergency

2017

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

In 2019, TCHNetwork provided the following: preventive oral healthcare services for 371 children; helped 660 people enroll in health insurance coverage; screened 524 community members for risk of heart disease; empowered 60 people to eat healthily on a limited budget through Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters class; tele-screened 109 people with diabetes for their annual retinopathy exam; distributed emergency funding to help 54 people overcome a crisis and stay warm and safe in their homes; provided 25 students with 264 school-based mental health sessions using telehealth technology; provided eight adults with 43 community-based mental health treatment sessions using telehealth technology; offered care coordination services

West End Business Development & Diversification Plan developed through community process

2017

to over 5,200 individuals, connecting them to supportive services; supported 15 clinics across a five-county region in screening their patients for social determinant of health needs; trained 299 people in Mental Health First Aid and Youth Mental Health First Aid programs; provided 476 no-cost rides to get people to their medical appointments; and performed in-home assessments and connected 121 older adults to resources to help them remain safe and independent in their homes.

2020 AND BEYOND

In 2020, TCHNetwork will survey community members to determine the strengths of our community and the barriers to health and wellness. It will use findings from this needs assessment to guide programming and organize priorities for the next three years.

Telluride Foundation awards grant for renovations to historic Wright Opera House, which opened in 1888

Telluride Foundation

• 35 • 20th Anniversary Issue

I M PAC T I N I T I AT I V E S

Photo Courtesy of Mountain Munchkins Preschool

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

8

TCHNetwork has achieved recognition and accreditation from the Department of Justice to offer Immigration Legal Services.

This accreditation and subsequent work have contributed to a drastic decrease in deportations and ICE activity in San Miguel County due to education and advocacy efforts with local elected officials and law enforcement. TCHNetwork staff hosted eight integrated, bilingual and bicultural community meetings; offered an eight-part Equity Series to teachers and administrators of the Telluride School District; coordinated with policy and advocacy organizations at the state level to bring rural voices to the Front Range to impact legislation around housing, food security, and drivers’ licenses; and helped navigate long-term medical cases for young children without access to health insurance.

I M M IGR ATION I NTE GR ATION An Initiative of Tri County Health Network (TCHNetwork), the Immigrant Integration Initiative focuses on creating a more inclusive community through services that improve health, increase engagement, educate, and empower members of our region’s immigrant population.

2020 & BEYOND

(Top) Preschool children demonstrate equity and cross-cultural friendship.

(Bottom Left) One-onone counseling is critical to supporting immigrant needs in the region.

(Bottom Right) TCHNetwork’s Latinx Advocacy Committee members.

2018

TF & WEEDC receive EDA Coal Impacted Communities grant of $860,000 for economic development projects

2019

New Horizon Coal Mine, in Nucla, closes in advance of Tri-State Power Plant closure

Telluride

West End

Ouray County

2019

Naturita Marijuana Dispensary, the first marijuana shop in the West End opens

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION ROLE

The Telluride Foundation funds and participates in this collaborative effort to encourage community organizations to better work together to support immigrant integration.

TCHNetwork was awarded “2019 Equity & Inclusion Nonprofit of the Year” by the Colorado Nonprofit Association. Its Immigrant

Integration Initiative ensures a single entry point for immigrant residents to access services that promote well-being, self-sufficeincy, health, education, social, and civic engagement. The Initiative uses a community mobilization strategy to help increase representation and consideration of immigrant communities.

2019

2020

Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association’s Nucla Station power plant closes September 9th at 9am

Now that TCHNetwork is accredited with the Department of Justice, it will expand its immigration legal services and offer more direct Spanish-languge support to clients navigating the complex immigration system. It will focus on creating a foundation of health and racial equity in our community by building individual and institutional capacity and cultivating champions and convenings around health equity.

Telluride Foundation celebrates its 20th Anniversary

Telluride Foundation

• 37 • 20th Anniversary Issue

FEATURE STORY

From Tesla to Tourism to TVA

An Odyssey of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

By SAMANTHA TISDEL WRIGHT

Photo Courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum

FEATURE

F ROM TESL A TO TOURI SM TO T VA

“Let the past surprise us out of what we think we know.”

STEPHEN A. BAILEY

Author of “L.L. Nunn, A Memoir”

B

Bold and daring innovation permeates Telluride’s dayto-day life.

It’s always been that way. The mining camps of the San Juans were the innovation bootcamps of the late 1800s, full of impossible problems that some of the most disruptive entrepreneurs of the era came here to solve.

Short and skinny as a racehorse jockey, our hero was selfpropelled by big ideas and high ideals. But, let’s be honest, he probably came to Telluride same as pretty much everyone else then and now, to have some fun, get lucky, and make a buck.

“To be clear, they were in it for the money. There was money to be had, and they were gonna try to make it,” said Telluride Historical Museum director Kiernan Lannon. “They never let the environment or the geography get in their way; necessity is the mother of invention.”

Perhaps the boldest innovator of them all was an eccentric spark of a man from a farm in Ohio,

desperate to find a cheap source of power for his Gold King Mine, who changed the way electricity would be delivered to the world.

It was the spring of 1881, and he was Lucien Lucius Nunn, Telluride’s original serial entrepreneur.

Nunn knew from the start that the miner’s life was not for him. “So,” said Lannon, “he decides he will be a barnacle on the mining industry.

Profit off of it without being in it.”

And what a great time it was to

Telluride Foundation

be a barnacle in Telluride!

AC-DC

Within a few years, the dirty, smelly, noisy little mining town would have more millionaires per capita than any other town in the U.S. It was a place on the brink of becoming – a broad, gritty canvas crowded with miners from around the world who needed supplies, services, comforts, and diversions.

Nunn found his solution in the vicious and nasty “War of the Currents” that brewed to the east.

By that time, much of America was already getting lit up by electricity, but hadn’t yet settled on a standard for electrification.

Two rivals were trying to become dominant: Thomas Edison, with his DC system, versus George Westinghouse and his AC system.

Nunn, the restless barnacle, was happy to oblige. He parlayed one business startup into another, and another, and another. Roof shingler. Hot bath hustler. Rancher.

Property developer. Newspaper publisher. Lawyer. Banker. There was just one thing he was not interested in doing, and that was working for someone else.

DC (Direct Current) was a great choice if you were right at the location where you needed light or power, but AC (Alternating Current) was cheaper and easier to transmit over long distances.

Sparks flew as these heavyweight electric titans brawled their way through the 1880s to gain market share and public acceptance for their competing systems. The stakes were phenomenally high. The man that controlled the currents controlled the electrified future of the world.

By 1889, Nunn had acquired lucrative water rights for placer mining down along the south fork of the San Miguel River near Ames and a controlling interest in the Gold King Mine, perched in a high alpine basin about three miles away.

That’s where the trouble started.

The most lucrative high-grade ore at the Gold King Mine had already been gouged out, and extraction costs were on the rise. The only way to power the mine and its nearby mill was to pack in expensive coal on the backs of burrows, cutting sharply into Nunn’s shrinking profits.

“Because he was a banker, he was not particularly fond of hemorrhaging money,” said Lannon. “He was looking for any way he could to increase efficiency and reduce cost.”

• 40 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Into this fray came the brilliant and strange electrical wizard Nikola Tesla, born in Serbia to Croatian parents, with his groundbreaking invention called an induction motor that could harness AC electricity to run machinery.

L.L NUNN

In May 1888, while Edison’s supporters were busy electrocuting stray dogs and cats to scare the public off AC, Westinghouse quietly paid Tesla a small fortune for his newly patented induction motor and other inventions that made AC a viable alternative

Deep Springs College, 1917 Short and skinny as a racehorse jockey, Nunn was self-propelled by big ideas and high ideals. (Photo Courtesy of L. Jackson Newell papers, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah)

Telluride Foundation

• 41 • 20th Anniversary Issue

FEATURE

F ROM TESL A TO TOURI SM TO T VA

to DC. Tesla came on board at Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh as a consultant.

see history in the making. Nunn threw a switch, his blue eyes flaring like twin pilot lights.

Now, all they needed was a pilot project – in some nice, discreet, out-of-the-way place – to test Tesla’s new technology.

A wild blue whip of electricity leaped into the air, then zinged along a 2.6-mile strand of naked copper line at 186,000 miles a second – the speed of light – instantly goosing the Tesla motor up at the Gold King Mine, which in turn sparked life into the ponderous 40-stamp ore crushing mill. No coal required.

THE LONG SHOT

Nunn could help with that.

Convinced that AC electricity could solve his power problems at the Gold King Mine, Nunn stormed the Westinghouse Electric Company headquarters like his slightly taller hero Napoleon in the spring of 1890 and made an electrifying pitch:

The crowds whooped with wonder.

They had just witnessed the world’s first long-distance transmission of AC electricity for industrial purposes.

“We want to use your new technology. We need your expertise (and money) to help us build a hydroelectric plant near Telluride at Ames. We are going to try to shoot this power three miles up the mountain to the Gold King Mine.”

Over the coming months, with this cheap and plentiful new power source, Nunn’s expenses at the Gold King Mine plummeted. Low grade orebodies, previously too expensive to mine, were suddenly profitable.

(Inset) Ames Power Plant original 100 H.P. generator.

(Courtesy of Center for Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College)

It was a completely crazy idea.

The project was going to cost a ton of money, and there was no guarantee of its success. But Nunn was not a man to be denied. He sweetened the deal with a sackful of gold worth $50,000 and convinced Westinghouse and a skeptical, skittish board of directors to join him in the proof-of-concept project.

(Top) Ames Hydroelectric Plant. (Courtesy of Telluride Historical Museum)

“This really was what put the nail in the coffin for DC,” Lannon said. “It was wildly successful, and greatly reduced the costs of mining.”

(Far Left) Nikola Tesla.

(Lef) Interior of the original Ames powerhouse, as it appeared in 1895, with a single 3.6-MW generator unit attached to two Pelton turbines.

A year later, on June 19, 1891, crowds gathered at the newly built Ames Hydroelectric Plant to

(Sketch) An illustration accompanying Tesla’s patent for his induction motor.

Telluride Foundation

• 42 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Nunn – ever the entrepreneur – created the world’s first electric utility at Ames and started selling cheap AC power to neighboring

Telluride Foundation

mines and the Town of Telluride. A few years after that, Westinghouse leveraged Tesla’s technology that had been proven at Ames to build an enormous industrial-scale AC power plant at Niagara Falls.

The War of the Currents was won.

NEW ENERGY

Fast-forward about 130 years to a Saturday morning last September, and the same spirit of risk-taking and innovation that once animated Nunn at the Ames Hydroelectric Plant now infused a sunlit classroom at the brand-new Norwood Public Library.

Here a group had gathered to attend a “Demystifying Entrepreneurship” bootcamp sponsored by the Telluride Venture Accelerator.

Maybe they had a business idea they were just beginning to work on. Maybe they didn’t even have a fully-fledged idea yet, but they were there to learn how to take an idea and turn it into something.

“Imagine a truck on the highway is going by at 90 miles an hour, and you’re hanging on to the bumper with your pinky,” said one of the instructors, a professor from the Leeds School of Business

• 43 • 20th Anniversary Issue

FEATURE

F ROM TESL A TO TOURI SM TO T VA

Just a few days earlier, it had looked like this bootcamp would be a bust. Hardly anyone had signed up.

Photo by Samantha Tisdel Wright

Then, as if from a burst of cosmic dust, the class filled up, and 17 brand new budding entrepreneurs sat around the table, paired off and talking with quiet, focused intensity about the new businesses they wanted to create.

(Top) Miners ride tram buckets up to the Gold King Mine. (Photo Courtesy of the San Juan County Historical Society) (Inset) Transmission towers atop Imogene Pass delivered electricity from Ames to the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray.

(Bottom) A historic tower from the Smuggler Union Tram has found a new home at the base of the Telluride Ski Area, near the gondola station.

(Right) Telluride Venture Accelerator cofounder Jesse Johnson.

Telluride Foundation

A mountain bike ranch in the West End. A coffee shop and gift basket business in Norwood. A pyrolysis plant at the Nucla landfill to process plastics into diesel fuel.

Artful light fixtures. Educational toys. A wellness app. A spa. A youth outdoor project. A food co-op.

The classroom crackled with energy and optimism. You could almost smell ozone in the air, almost see the wild blue whips of electricity zinging around above their heads.

There’s a lot riding on their eventual success. According to a recent report from the Kauffman Foundation titled “America’s New Business Plan,” all net job creation comes from companies that are younger than five years old.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, the rate of new startups is actually down – “and drastically down

• 44 • 20th Anniversary Issue

to in Telluride and Ames back in the 1890s, and what recent TVA grad Natalie Binder is up to at an old mining camp near Naturita.

Photo by Makaela Vodopich, Desert Snow Photography

at CU Boulder. “That’s what today’s going to feel like.”

Binder surveys the scruffy landscape, the junk-littered yards, the assortment of mostly unoccupied cabins and shacks, and smiles at this dream in progress – just as innovative in its own way as the old Ames Hydro Plant that still whirrs away upstream, alongside the south fork of the San Miguel River.

Vancorum, a quiet, shady settlement of 14 cabins built by the Vanadium Corporation in the 1940s to house the engineers who once worked in a nearby uranium mill, will soon be transformed into Camp V. among younger populations,” said past TVA Program Director Ashley Nager. “And that could snowball into a massive problem.”

The solution, on both a national and local level, is to create an environment where fledgling startups can take root, attract investors, and grow new jobs during that first critical five-year window.

Too often, however, all the air in the room is sucked up by already well-established companies.

That’s where business incubators like the Telluride Venture Accelerator come in. Just as a nebula serves as a nursery for young stars, TVA is doing its part to help nurture and launch new startups and invest in entrepreneurs from southwestern Colorado and beyond with the skills and confidence they need to succeed,

with the goal of strengthening and diversifying the regional economy.

With support from the Telluride Foundation, TVA pairs its participants with an incredible network of business mentors and industry leading experts from across the country – many of them secondhomeowners right in Telluride – and funds itself through investments in the companies it helps to launch.

The bootcamp model allows TVA to work with companies at different stages of development, as well as different “verticals” – new fields with promising companies that may attract investors.

WELCOME TO CAMP V

At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find any sort of connection between what L.L. Nunn was up

Telluride Foundation

Part “glampground,” part Burning Man, part outdoor adventure mecca, Binder’s vision for Camp V is to redefine the traditional camping experience through unique design, experimental architecture, storytelling, and world class outdoor recreation.

There will be a vintage welcome bus lounge, an outdoor movie theater, art trails, communal bonfires, and unique accommodations ranging from traditional campsites, van spaces, and a “Hammock Town” down by the river, to fully furnished safari tents, artfully remodeled cabins, and an Airstream Village for more upscale guests.

Her friends back in Telluride can’t wait to check in.

It’s been a big week – Binder just

• 45 • 20th Anniversary Issue

FEATURE

F ROM TESL A TO TOURI SM TO T VA

ski resort after its own mining economy collapsed four decades ago – finds herself at the forefront of an effort to rebrand the West End as a tourism and recreation destination.

She and her business partners, Bruce and Jodie Wright of One Architect in Telluride, hope to start welcoming guests this summer, and there’s a lot to do between now and then.

With her background in high-end hospitality, a master’s degree in construction management, and family roots in Naturita that go all the way back to the 1940s when her grandmother was secretary to the president of the Vanadium Corporation, Binder is gambling that she has got just what it takes to turn the old Vancorum property into something uniquely new, honoring Naturita’s colorful past while energizing its future.

Today, Binder is pulling down old fences and putting things into piles.

Burn pile. Bike pile.

Tire pile. Trash pile.

“We have a lot of land.

And a lot of junk…. And some chickens,” she laughs.

The chickens – and the few remaining Vancorum tenants that remain on the property – will soon have to relocate as the project gets underway in earnest. Some of the junk will remain and get repurposed into art.

If all goes according to plan, Camp V could be a game-changer for the once bustling uranium mining towns of the West End, which recently suffered the closures of the Tri-State coalfired power plant and New Horizon Mine.

With those closures, 70 well-paying jobs blew away, just like that.

New opportunities are on the horizon, though.

The West End was recently designated as an Opportunity Zone with significant tax breaks for investors. Binder – filled with the same kind of entrepreneurial zeal that transformed Telluride into a world-class

to be a $3 million investment in Naturita. It’s just an amazing outcome that I never would have predicted when we started this. And hopefully there’s more to come.”

Photos (Left Inset & Right) Courtesy of Camp V

closed on $3 million in financing for the project and quit her day job, with a highend property management company in Telluride, to work on Camp V full time.

A NEW BEGINNING IN THE WEST END

Back at the West End Economic Development Corporation headquartered in Naturita, WEEDC executive director Deana Sheriff couldn’t agree more, “Sure,” she acknowledges, “The West End is going through challenging times, but along with the challenge is a sense of excitement and possibility.”

Old story lines about the region’s depressed economy and isolation are giving way to new ones about its wild beauty, blazing fast internet, and strategic location between the booming towns of Telluride and Moab.

Her pitch? “We believe art can save the world, and we plan to begin here with outdoor recreation as our backdrop.”

The West End is a place on the brink of becoming – a broad and gritty canvas, appealingly uncrowded and rough around the edges – inviting the next bold strokes of innovation.

Binder credits her recent participation in the Telluride Venture Accelerator with giving her the confidence and entrepreneurial skills she needed to attract investors and turn her vision into reality.

TF

The project is still in its infancy. But Binder can already see Camp V on the map – lit up in neon – beckoning to happy glampers from around the world.

(Top) Camp V co-founders, Natalie Binder and Jodie Wright, by vintage bus that came with the property and is being transformed into a lounge and retail space.

TVA co-founder and philanthropist Jesse Johnson is thrilled with how it’s turning out.

“The Camp V story is a particularly great one to celebrate, I think, because so many different pieces came together to make it happen,” he said. “Ultimately, there’s going

Telluride Foundation

• 46 • 20th Anniversary Issue

(Bottom) The recently decommissioned TriState coal-fired power plant near Nucla.

Telluride Foundation

• 47 • 20th Anniversary Issue

33% RENT

44% 24%

OWN

RENT

RENT

ANSWERS

06

OURAY

Maggie’s Kitchen

OURAY

10

$

12

$

True Grit Cafe

Blondie’s

650

$

TEST YOUR REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE. SAN MIGUEL COUNTY

575

$

RIDGWAY

FACTS

NATURITA

The Town of Nucla got its name from nuclear energy due to the surrounding uranium mines.

Cheeseburger

The Divide Restaurant

04

COST OF A BASIC

TRUE OR FALSE?

NORWOOD

(Federal & State)

PUBLIC LANDS

MONTROSE

OPHIR/RICO

66 55 8

$

TRUE OR FALSE?

At an elevation of 9,000 feet, deer turn into elk.

1499

$

24

The Chop House

56%

OWN

OWN

OURAY

TELLURIDE

76%

67%

SAN MIGUEL COUNTY

Smugglers

TELLURIDE

68.8%

TELLURIDE

NORWOOD

47.9%

in our service area

(By School District)

WEST END

01 False. 02 False. 03 True. 04 False. 05 True. 06 False.

RENTING VS. OWNERSHIP

DID YOU KNOW?

63.8%

13ER & 14ER PEAKS

The prairie dog is the official animal of the Town of Telluride.

Bridal Veil Falls is Colorado’s tallest free-falling waterfall at 365 feet.

FUN

TRUE OR FALSE?

The Sheridan Opera House was originally called the Segerberg Opera House.

O2

8,991

TRUE OR FALSE?

San Miguel County

9,583

05

# PEOPLE

# COWS

TRUE OR FALSE?

PEOPLE VS. COWS

The Telluride Foundation has an official curling team.

03

01

TRUE OR FALSE?

FEATURE STORY

Knitting the Safety Net

Benevolence & Philanthropy in the San Juans By SAMANTHA TISDEL WRIGHT

FEATURE

KNI TTI N G THE SAFET Y NET

Christmas Day in Telluride in 1921 was a good one. everal inches of fresh snow had fallen overnight, and giant, lacy snowflakes drifted lazily from the sky throughout the day. It wasn’t freezing, but the air was crisp and cold enough to make for rosy cheeks and runny noses.

S

Christmas fell on a Sunday that year, and the townspeople crowded into Telluride’s churches to enjoy special music programs.

Then came the visit from St. Nick.

Ably assisted by members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of

Elks Lodge No. 692, Santa breezed into town at high noon on a horsedrawn sleigh and greeted Telluride kiddies in the lavishly decorated Elks lodge-room, with its towering Christmas tree and mounds of toys beneath the sheltering boughs.

With the gifts dispersed, the Elks Santa climbed back into his sleigh and zipped around his Elkdom, waving “halloes” to bundled-up pedestrians, and making special deliveries “to the homes of the poor and the kiddies who, by reason of quarantine or, for other reasons, were unable to attend the reception at the club,” the Telluride Daily Journal reported.

The city hospital was among the first places he visited, followed by the poor farm and the pest house. From there, it was on to Pandora, Smuggler, and Tomboy, then back to the Elks Lodge for a well-deserved cup or two of Christmas cheer.

The Elks were part of the informal social safety net that knit together the mountain towns of the San Juans over a century ago – a combination of unions, lodges, churches, fraternal organizations, and local philanthropists.

(Left) Historic headline from the Telluride Daily Journal.

(Below) The Ouray Elks Lodge.

(Bottom) Exterior detail from the Telluride Masonic Lodge.

a mining community filled with single men far from home, belonging to such an organization meant they would be taken care of, in this harsh environment, even if they died.

Banding together back then was a matter of survival.

Because if you slipped through the cracks, it could be a long, hard fall that ended at the poor farm, or worse, an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

KNITTING LESSONS

Telluride Foundation

• 52 • 20th Anniversary Issue

If you were looking for a fraternal organization to join in Ouray or Telluride at the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of options.

the World, the Odd Fellows, the Freemasons, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, The Knights of Pythias, the Macabees, and many, many more.

By 1905, there were more than 20 active clubs in the area. Besides the Elks, there were the Woodmen of

Some clubs provided life insurance benefits and death benefits to their official dues-paying members. In

Telluride Foundation

Women were joiners too, with auxiliary organizations like the Rebekah Lodge (the women’s wing of the Odd Fellows), Order of the Eastern Star (a co-ed branch of the Masonic Lodge), Women of Woodcraft and the Commonweal Club.

Ethnically segregated community halls like Finn Hall and Swede-Finn Hall in Telluride sprang up as places for immigrants to gather and look after their own.

Down on the shady side of town, the madams looked after their own, as well – but they weren’t necessarily motivated by benevolence. The ladies of the line were considered a

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commodity, and taking care of them made good business sense; it was all about eking out an existence.

In the late 1890s, the Western Federation of Miners came to town, offering a new kind of social safety net to its members. During the brief time that the union took root in Telluride, it fought for better wages, safer working conditions, and an eight-hour work day for its members.

From unions to lodges, madams to miners, churches to ethnic community centers, people back then looked out for each other as best they could. They may not have always liked each other, and they would get into fights, but they managed to make a community in a place where it was difficult to exist by banding together in their separate spheres.

WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED

There was clearly a desperate need for medical care in the isolated mining camps of the San Juans, but not everyone could afford to pay for it. Some communities were lucky enough to have a built-in charitable solution to that problem.

In Ouray, a Catholic ministry called the Sisters of Mercy built St. Joseph’s Miners’ Hospital in 1887 at a cost of $3,500. Thomas Walsh, the wealthy owner of the Camp Bird Mine, helped the Sisters pay off their mortgage.

Various mines in the region “subscribed” to the hospital to provide care for injured miners.

But records show that the Sisters also provided considerable indigent care to the community. Out of the 998 patients they treated from Sept. 1887 to Jan. 1, 1893 (with 90 deaths), 156 were charity patients.

Telluride finally got a hospital of its own in 1896, paid for with mining money from the giant syndicates up in Savage and Marshall basins.

Conveniently located right at the bottom of Tomboy Road, it was called Hall’s Hospital after its first physician, Dr. Hall. But more often it was known simply as the Community Hospital.

In addition to treating grisly mining injuries and gunshot wounds incurred in barroom brawls, the hospital staff eased the final hours of ancient, destitute prospectors, stood by helplessly as children died of meningitis and other incurable ailments, and tended to the births of over 600 babies that were born there during the six decades the hospital remained open.

When the Labor War broke out in Telluride, the National Guard occupied the miners hospital and denied striking miners care, so in 1902 the Western Federation of Miners built its own structure a few blocks away that served as union headquarters and provided free medical care for striking miners.

That short-lived arrangement

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came to an end in 1904 when the union lost its bloody labor battle in Telluride and abruptly decamped.

The Idarado Mine later subsidized the hospitals in Telluride and Ouray, much as a previous generation of mine operators had once done. In the 1960s, Idarado built modern clinics in both Telluride and Ouray, where subsidized community healthcare continued well into the 1970s.

PHILANTHROPY, GREED AND THE “COUNTY POOR”

The history of philanthropy in mining communities is spotty.

Some mining boomtowns were lucky enough to have their own self-made millionaires who lessened the need for public assistance by pouring their fortunes back into their communities.

(Inset) A funeral procession at the Smuggler-Union Mine in Marshall Basin. (Photo Courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum) (Top) Dr. Anna F.S. Brown (in dark skirt) with staff, on the porch of Hall’s Hospital where the Telluride Historical Museum is now located. (Photo Courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum) (Opposite Left) Thomas Walsh.

(Left) Miners at the Smuggler-Union boarding house. (Photo Courtesy of the Telluride Historical Society)

Such was the case in Ouray with Tom Walsh, the unassuming and philanthropic Irish immigrant who made his fortune at the Camp Bird Mine. Walsh treated his miners well, and helped the poor and down-and-out throughout his life.

He made sure that nobody went hungry in Ouray while he lived there during his Camp Bird days and left the community a better place than he found it through his endowment of a new library and financial support for the hospital.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the wealthy industrialists that bought up and consolidated the mines around Telluride in 1890, for example, the Rothschilds of England

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who purchased the Tomboy Mine in 1896.

The people running these mines could be real scoundrels and were much more interested in wringing money out of the mountains than investing it back into the community.

night while the family was engaged in reading and doing school work. The house still stands in a meadow just south of the Cedar Hill Cemetery and has since been beautifully remodeled.

Labor’s 1903-04 defeat made matters worse by wiping out the prominent role that unions and union-friendly lodges and fraternal organizations had played in sustaining the region’s needy.

ANGEL BASKETS

Over time the past has been painted over, but hunger and poverty have continued to haunt this region through the decades.

At about this time, county governments became increasingly responsible for caring for their most impoverished citizens. In Colorado, counties levied a small “poor tax” to provide public relief to their neediest residents. The chairman of the board of county commissioners was declared ex officio superintendent of the poor of his county.

Davine Pera was well aware of this in the early ‘80s, when she was working for San Miguel County’s social services department and saw that some families in the region could not afford to celebrate Christmas.

So she filled some baskets with food and gifts and delivered them to a handful of needy families.

Poor people requesting aid were required to register with the county clerk, who recorded their name, age, sex, place of birth, time of immigration to the United States, and other relevant details in a book entitled “Record of County Poor.”

PEST HOUSES AND POOR FARMS

Rich or poor, if you caught a contagious disease like small pox back in the day, it was off to the pest house with you. Telluride’s was on the hillside above the old brewery on the western outskirts of town. The Feb. 28, 1901 issue of the Daily Journal made it sound like some sort of spa: “The spot is a most picturesque and pleasant one, situated at Butcher Creek about threequarters of a mile from town, with a wagon road already built to it up the mountain side. There is no publicly traveled road or trail in the vicinity, and a more desirable spot in which to isolate persons who may be so unfortunate as to contract pestilential

diseases can nowhere be found.”

With highly contagious diseases like smallpox running rampant, pest houses were accepted as a necessary evil for the common good. But there were plenty of people (then as now) who resented the idea of public money being spent more broadly on indigent care, and believed that the poor should work to earn their keep.

That was the idea behind the poor farms that used to be common on Colorado’s Western Slope. Poor farms served as the homeless shelters of their time. They were located on land set aside by counties for the care of so-called “paupers” – a kind of warehousing of the impoverished.

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(Left Top & Bottom) The Ouray County Poor Farm, then and now.

(Right) Angel Baskets volunteers wrap holiday gifts for low-income residents of Telluride, Mountain Village, and the West End.

Able-bodied inmates were required to clean their quarters, raise livestock, and grow their own food. Deaths at the poor farms were common, and the county, when necessary, arranged for pauper burials.

Ouray County created a poor farm in 1914 at a shabby old mansion it had taken back for taxes called the Jackson House, located at the abandoned townsite of Ramona about halfway between Ridgway and Ouray.

A few years later, with the urging of

local newspaper editors, Telluride followed suit. The Telluride Poor Farm was west of town out by the old brewery and pest house. Its main occupants were destitute, aging prospectors and miners.

Poor farms persisted across Colorado through the Great Depression, but disappeared in the 1930s with the passage of the Social Security Act. Ouray County’s shut down for good in 1937 and reverted to a private residence.

A family that lived there in the 1970s said they were often disturbed by a ghost that would come downstairs at

Telluride Foundation

The program blossomed into Angel Baskets, an annual giving spree that the whole Telluride community takes part in, brightening the holidays of hundreds of low-income individuals in Telluride, Mountain Village, and the West End. Since food insecurity and poverty impact these communities year round, Angel Baskets has expanded its mission in recent years to fund food pantries in Telluride, Norwood, and Dove Creek, which support more than 650 food-insecure people a month. In addition, they fund a school supply “backpack” program for kids in the West End, and an apothecary program that ensures seniors in the West End do not have to choose between food and needed medication.

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“It was a huge stretch for us at first, and now it’s just, that’s what we do,” shrugged Angel Baskets co-chair Kathy Mahoney.

“The community is so generous. I’m in awe every year, just completely in awe. The extent of the generosity is staggering.”

IMPACT IN ACTION HEROES

Michele Blunt Barb Gross

(Left) A driver for the Care and Share food program delivers tons of food to the Norwood Food Bank.

And so, frankly, is the level of need – even in places like Telluride and Mountain Village that appear to be so wealthy on the surface.

SAW A PROBLEM:

(Right) Neatly organized rows of food items line the shelves at the Norwood Food Bank.

Food insecurity in San Miguel County.

FOUND A SOLUTION:

“Christmas is a luxury for some families,” said Mahoney. “That’s what Davine saw all those years ago. And there is food insecurity.

People are hungry. There is large need here in this community, supporting our resort economy.”

Volunteering to run food pantries in Norwood and Telluride. crates of Gatorade, and boxes of random canned and dry food items.

The entryway is dominated by a huge box full of cakes, donuts, sacks of bagels, and other bakery goodies.

FEEDING THE HUNGRY

It’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means it’s truck offload day at the Norwood Food Bank. A semi-truck from the Care and Share food program in Colorado Springs has just delivered thousands of pounds of food to the Christ in FOCUS Church, located on the southern fringe of Norwood where town meets field.

In the modest church sanctuary, rows of pews have been pushed aside to make way for pallets of red onions,

Food bank director Michelle Blunt is giving orders, consulting clipboards, pointing a dozen volunteers in a dozen directions as they roll big boxes of nonperishable items into the food pantry room, load frozen meats and juices into freezers in the kitchen, heft even more boxes in the “government” rooms, where food for the Senior Commodity Food Program (for those over age 60 with a limited income) and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (for all low-income individuals) is stored.

Kary Herndon, a Norwood native

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wearing a hand-knit hat, is stationed on a folding chair in the food pantry room to help direct traffic and tame chaos. “It makes you feel like you are in a military commissary in Afghanistan. In a good way,” she said.

Between the Care and Share shipments, USDA commodities, regular donations from local grocery stores, and locally grown seasonal produce distributed through the Norwood Community Garden and FRESH Food Hub, the Norwood Food Bank takes in and gives out a whopping 9,000-10,000 pounds of food each month.

Over 130 families from Telluride, Mountain Village, Placerville, Nucla, Naturita, Redvale, Egnar, Bedrock, and Paradox take home

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about $200 worth of groceries per visit – the equivalent of a full grocery cart at Walmart.

“A lot of food walks out of here,” Blunt said.

I AM WORRIED ABOUT:

“We have pretty much grown out of this space. I keep looking at the church sanctuary and thinking, ‘Look at the shelves I could put in here.’ – Michele

Angel Baskets use to run its own small food pantry in Norwood, but decided in 2015 to integrate with the larger program that Blunt runs. Most of her clients qualify for federal food assistance programs and supplement with additional food from the Angel Basketsfunded portion of the pantry.

“It’s hard to get younger people involved (as volunteers).” – Barb SEEDS WE NEED TO PLANT NOW TO IMPACT THE FUTURE:

“I was once a single mom and homeless. And if you always do the same thing, you’re always going to be there. You have to be able to find some way to change the situation you’re in.

You have to work hard. You have to choose.” – Michele

The Telluride Food Pantry is tiny by comparison, but still manages to serve about 50 people on a typical food distribution day. People line up outside, rain or snow or shine, and “are just bursting to get in” by the

“I believe that we’re here to make things better. That’s why we’re here on this earth. And, I feel like they (the food bank clients) are helping me accomplish that mission. I know I am making their lives better. They tell me that I am, and that feels good. Who knows, though. That could be me someday, right? Well, maybe not. But it could be. It could be. You never really know.” – Barb

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Photos by Makaela Vodopich, Desert Snow Photography

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time the doors open, said Telluride food pantry director Barb Gross.

Clients are taken around the facility one by one, and typically walk out with a couple bags or boxes of nonperishable food items and some fresh produce. They are only allowed to come in once a month.

ski resort employees during the offseason to homeless, toothless men who live in trucks, but she knows there are others that aren’t coming in that could really use the help – like couch-surfing emancipated minors and members of Telluride’s Latinx immigrant community.

“We’re basically viewed as an emergency food pantry,” Gross explained. “But they can come weekly for produce and dairy, if we have it.”

In order to remove as many barriers as possible, the Telluride Food Pantry has a very minimal intake procedure and does not require people to show proof that they financially qualify for aid. Perhaps because of this, Gross said, there’s a misconception in the community that the people using the food bank are freeloaders who don’t actually need help.

Gross and her volunteers see a real cross-section of the community at the Telluride food pantry, from young families to seniors on a fixed income, to out-of-work servers and

Charitable Giving A HISTORY OF BENEVOLENT ORGANIZATIONS

In 1899, Telluride’s miners started an organized labor movement to address dangerous working conditions leading to injuries and loss of life, as well as poor pay and lack of healthcare benefits.

2500 BCE

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For the most part, Gross doesn’t see that. In fact, she is amazed by how much food insecurity there is in the region. “It often comes down to paying rent or buying food,” she said.

Thanks to the food pantries that Angel Baskets and other organizations run throughout the region, fewer people have to make that choice.

THE NEW NET

From hunger to affordable housing to wealth inequality to mental health, the social challenges our small, rural communities in southwestern Colorado face

That was perhaps Telluride’s first formal effort at acts of charity as we know them today – the voluntary giving of help to those in need.

However, charitable giving and philanthropy have been part of humanity throughout recorded history. Ancient Hebrews in 2500 BCE mandated giving to benefit the poor. Plato organized groups working for the public good on a voluntary basis. In the New World, Harvard University initiated the first American fundraising drive in 1643.

Giving to help one another is truly part of the fabric of American culture. In 1835, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville highlighted the

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now are as daunting as ever.

But we’re far better equipped to handle those challenges today than we were a century ago; human services and compassion for neighbors manifest in our region in myriad ways.

Robust nonprofits like Hilltop Family Resource Center in Montrose and the San Miguel Resource Center in Telluride help domestic violence and sexual assault survivors find the resources they need to create new lives.

Poor farms have given way to social security and subsidized housing.

The Tri-County Health Network is preemptively removing all kinds of barriers to healthcare across our rural region – from mental health to kids’ dental care, to insurance enrollment to senior transportation and immigrant legal support – before gaping new holes in the social safety net can develop.

Churches and volunteer-driven benevolent organizations like

Antiquated rural miners hospitals have been replaced by federallyqualified Community Health Centers like the Uncompahgre Medical Center in Norwood, dedicated to ensuring that all patients receive quality healthcare regardless of their ability to pay.

philanthropic spirit of Americans as one of the new country’s strengths in his four-volume tome, “Democracy in America”.

To formalize our current system of giving, the U.S. Congress enacted the charitable deduction for individuals in 1917. This was essentially a contract between the individual taxpayer and the federal government to allow taxpayers to direct some of their taxable income back toward their communities.

America’s first community foundation was founded 110 years ago. Born in a reformist era, the community foundation idea spread rapidly throughout the U.S. and then the world. America now has over 800 community foundations and 1.5 million nonprofits, and Americans give

Angel Baskets and the Elks play a vital role in addressing all kinds of community issues, too – and not just at Christmas.

Supporting it all, a new generation of philanthropists is pouring its collective wealth back into the region through the various initiatives of the Telluride Foundation.

It’s a new kind of safety net – constantly morphing with the warp and weft of our diverse communities.

And hopefully, fewer people are slipping through the cracks.

TF

over $400 billion annually.

The next generation of giving and philanthropy is rapidly evolving to match the complexities of today’s problems, including homelessness, local economic transitions due to market shifts, climate change, and public education. From the Giving Pledge, where philanthropists commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy, to a new era of social enterprise, with market approaches such as impact investing, there are giving opportunities to address the scope and scale of the challenges.

The Telluride Foundation, partnering with our amazing donors, is part of the new generation of strategic approaches to tackling our communities’ complex social problems.

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2020 Today there are over 800 community foundations and 1.5 million nonprofits in America

B E

H

T S C

N D

I

H E N

Q&A WITH

Q&A WITH

LYNN BORUP

APRIL MONTGOMERY

Executive Director, Tri-County Health Network

E

WHAT DO YOU DO?

E S

I get to collaborate with an incredibly dynamic team and passionate partners to think outside the box in identifying innovative solutions to address our community’s health needs.

WHY DO YOU DO THIS WORK?

Because rural communities deserve access to the same scope of health services as our urban counterparts. We are improving the overall health of our communities, one program at a time.

WHAT GETS YOU UP EACH MORNING?

•

IN THE TRENCHES WITH FOUNDATION STAFF

•

At the Telluride Foundation, we operate programs, doing the work that might not get done otherwise. Whether it’s public health, workforce development, or community and economic development, it takes boots on the ground – people who roll up their sleeves and make things happen.

Our programs require smart, experienced, and driven staff, who are ready to get away from their desks and out in the region, working side by side with community members.

Seeing the positive outcomes and hearing the stories from clients about how our programming has impacted their health is beyond rewarding — families shouldn’t have to choose between eating healthy foods versus paying rent, or purchasing health insurance versus having a reliable vehicle.

Telluride Foundation Vice President of Programs WHAT DO YOU DO?

I oversee programs, including Community Grants, Strong Neighbors, Local Food Initiative, and scholarships.

WHY DO YOU DO THIS WORK?

I can’t imagine a job that could bring me more fulfillment. I’m challenged intellectually and continuously need to learn new skills and keep up with current trends.

WHAT GETS YOU UP EACH MORNING?

I keep a bulletin board in my office filled with thank you notes from people touched by the work of the Foundation; it’s a constant reminder of our impact and how our work makes a difference in people’s lives.

WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?

Ensuring we have enough funding for our 25 employees and that our programming remains clientcentric, efficient, and reaches everyone who needs it.

Is the Telluride Foundation doing enough, and what else can we do? We are working on complicated issues – food insecurity, workforce housing, economic diversity – problems that won’t be solved overnight. Who is still going hungry, losing housing, or unable to find employment?

WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE?

WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE?

WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?

Vibrant and healthy communities where everyone has the opportunity and ability to thrive.

Where the communities we serve, from Telluride to Rico, Ouray to Paradox, are more connected and collaborative, and we see each regional community as our neighbor.

FEATURE STORY

“What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?”

DAVID WHYTE

“What to Remember When Waking”

Explorations in Our Once and Future Foodshed

By SAMANTHA TISDEL WRIGHT

O

ne way to get to know your local foodshed is through its ditches.

The historic Gurley Ditch faithfully wets the farms and hayfields of Wright’s Mesa around Norwood and Redvale, Colorado, fed by a high-country reservoir on the eastern skirts of the Lone Cone.

Company Ditch, otherwise known as the CCC. This old ditch channels irrigation water 17 miles from the San Miguel River to the former Ute hunting grounds of Tabeguache Park, where a group of socialists built a would-be utopian farming colony called Nucla at the turn of the 20th century.

THE DITCH RIDER

Early Ouray residents operated dairy farms that delivered hundreds of gallons of milk up to the mines, and grew potatoes in the field (lower center) where Fellin Park is now located. (Photo by William Henry Jackson, 1901)

The Uncompahgre Valley has the Old Agency Ditch, built in 1875 to water the Los Piños Ute Indian Agency near Colona, where federal agents were once tasked with teaching the Utes how to farm.

Turns out, the Utes were way ahead of the whites; they had already been farming in the Montrose region with the help of Mexican servants for decades, if not generations.

Nucla has the Colorado Cooperative

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Headgate. Trestle. Siphon.

Nobody knows the CCC better than its ditch rider Dean Naslund, a fifthgeneration Nucla cattleman charged with maintaining the dirt aqueduct.

Naslund has a warm handshake and a shaggy dog with one brown eye and one blue eye that keeps him company as he rumbles along old Highway 90 on a gray winter day.

Past the decommissioned coal-fired

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GROWI N G LOC AL

power plant at the bottom of Nucla Hill. Past the birding hotspot of Silver Hawk Ranch with its fallow alfalfa fields. Past the place where the pavement ends. Up into the wild hills that roll like thunder toward the Uncompahgre Plateau.

In the winter, the ditch is dry, but you can still trace its thin scar as it slices across the hillside across the valley, running parallel to the highway and the San Miguel River down below. “All you have to do is look for the cottonwood trees,” Naslund says.

The plan today was to go see the ditch’s headgate and diversion dam where the Colorado Water Trust partnered with other organizations, including the Telluride Foundation, to help fund the installation of a fish ladder and a low flow channel in the river bed in 2011.

The road up to the head gate turns out to be too muddy, though, so we detour to the abandoned townsite of Piñon near Cottonwood Creek instead. Here, from 1897-1903, the CCC colonists built the highest irrigation trestle in the world to ferry water across Cottonwood Canyon and then labored to extend the ditch to Nucla, using nothing more than picks, shovels, and spirit levels.

Food was so scarce in those days, they called the place Lick-Skillet. The only thing that grew abundantly in the communal garden was a hardy breed of bean called the ditchdigger. Cooks had to get creative with their menus: bean loaf, bean salad, bean sandwiches, bean stew.

Today, there’s not much left of Piñon (or its socialist ideals) except a few old abandoned houses set back in the woods and a small fenced cemetery with a handful of headstones. People didn’t live here for long; they literally picked up their community and moved it to Nucla as soon as the ditch was done.

economy that they once were, and self-sufficient local foodsheds have given way to convoluted food supply chains that may start halfway across the country or around the world – with stops at produce terminals, stockyards, processing companies, warehouses, and countless gas stations along the way.

Even the remarkable trestle is gone, replaced by a modern inverted siphon that sucks the ditch water down the steep slope of Cottonwood Canyon and up the other side on its long journey to the fertile fields of Tabeguache Park.

Juicy ripe hothouse tomatoes from the Paradox Valley have a hard time finding their way to salad plates in Telluride, while pallid massproduced tomatoes from the San Joaquin Valley find ample shelf space at local supermarkets.

FIRST FOODSHEDS

Over the years, a handful of farmers in the region, such as Barclay and Tony Daranyi of Norwood’s Indian Ridge Farm and Bakery, have been working hard to re-stoke the region’s appetite for locally produced food and to nurture a new crop of local food producers.

Now, with a boost from the Telluride Foundation’s Local Food Initiative, these efforts are taking root and coming to fruition. There’s a lot going on in the local food movement these days, connecting local supply with local demand, while reinvigorating the regional economy.

Dairies. Ranches. Farms.

For a long time after the white intrusion into southwestern Colorado, which began with miners and continued with pioneer settlers that squatted on Ute land, mining and agriculture went hand in hand. Tidy foodsheds connected down-river ranches and farms to mining settlements and boarding houses up in the high country.

From the orchards of the West End to the spud fields of the Lone Cone and from the dairies of San Miguel to the prolific produce farms of Uncompahgre Park, the foodsheds were fruitful. Bellies were full. People knew exactly where their food came from, and the region was self-sufficient.

It’s not so simple now.

Agriculture and mining are no longer the cornerstones of our regional

Telluride Foundation

Photo by Samantha Tisdel Wright

FEATURE

THE APPLE CORE PROJECT

Hawkeye. York. Snow.

On a cool spring morning in mid-March, Jen Nelson and Melanie Eggers sit in an orchard near downtown Nucla that was planted by a Swedish pig farmer and CCC colonist named John Lundahl over a century ago.

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(Top) Cottonwood trestle and flume at Pinon.

(Left) Colorado Cooperative Company ditch office in Nucla.

(Right) Jane Thompson, president of the Rimrocker Historical Society, holds up a flour sack from the old Nucla Flour Mill.

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Ghostly apple trees spread their gray branches against the gray sky. In a month, they’ll be dressed in fluffy pink blossoms. In the fall, if all goes well, there will be apples – Hawkeye, York, and Snow – three of the 25 or so heirloom apple varieties they have identified so far in the feral old apple orchards of the West End.

thanks to the cold nights and intense ultraviolet light.

“Our vision is to plant and inspire the planting of a new generation of these rare and delectable fruit varieties,” Nelson says.

Nelson and Eggers are pomologists.

They have a passion for apples.

For the past four years, they have been on a mission to sleuth out and catalogue local apple varieties planted

by CCC colonists and other historic West End farmers and propagate them for future generations through a program they call the Apple Core Project.

Grafting an apple tree involves fusing donor rootstock with scion from a living tree. Since apple trees grown from seed rarely produce fruit that resembles their mother apple, grafting is the only way to propagate an heirloom tree’s potentially rare genetics for future generations.

Just as new scion can be grafted onto old rootstock, Nelson and Eggers see real potential in reviving the fruit growing economy in the West End. THE MAROLF RANCH

Heirloom apples have a higher nutrient content than familiar modern varieties, like the red delicious, and a kazillion unique flavors – winter banana, anyone?

The high elevation on the Western Slope makes the apples that grow here extra-sweet and nutritious,

Earth. Wind. Wheat.

Photos (Inset & Right) by Makaela Vodopich, Desert Snow Photography

The two friends and their respective husbands are also the proud new owners of Lundahl’s 40 acres, where they nurture a little demonstration orchard of handgrafted heirloom trees using scion cuttings from around the region.

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(Inset) Apple Core Project Co-founders, Jen Nelson and Melanie Eggers.

(Above) Prominent Ouray citizen John Ashenfelter had a 360-acre orchard on Spring Creek Mesa south of Montrose at the turn of the 20th century.

(Far Left) The Marolf Ranch entrance.

(Left) “Turkey Red” heirloom wheat from Marolf Ranch in Norwood.

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As Nelson and Eggers sit in their Nucla orchard, quietly discussing apples and their children, slender green shoots of winter wheat push their way up into the sunlight in a neatly plowed 11-acre field on the outskirts of Norwood, meticulously tended by Ernie and Karyn Marolf.

Both have deep agricultural roots in the area. Ernie’s grandparents homesteaded in nearby Sanborn Park and raised dairy cows and sold cream and eggs. Karyn’s grandparents homesteaded in Dry Creek Basin and

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raised sheep and cattle. Today, the Marolfs run a farming and ranching operation on Wright’s Mesa.

Ranchers around Norwood traditionally grew dryland wheat to supplement grass hay for their cattle. If you drive around the backroads of Wright’s Mesa, you can still see all the old grain silos rising crookedly out of the landscape.

Grain farming required extensive plowing and only produced one crop a year. When the Gurley ditch system was complete, making irrigation possible, most ranchers switched to growing lowermaintenance alfalfa instead.

Not Karyn and Ernie. They have always grown wheat to feed their cattle, mainly because Ernie likes to plow.

Now, they’re trying something new – growing wheat for human consumption. For the past two years, they’ve been planting an organic strain of heirloom wheat called Turkey Red to sell to the local wholesale bakery, Blue Grouse Bread.

“Turkey Red” came to Kansas in 1873 with Mennonite immigrants from Crimea in Ukraine who were fleeing Russia’s military conscription.

“It’s known for its flavor,” Karyn says. “It’s a good, hard, red wheat.”

Ernie sows the wheat in the fall.

It sleeps in the earth under a blanket of snow all winter, then sprouts up the next spring and grows and goldens through the summer until it’s ready to harvest.

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As long as the summer monsoons come, it doesn’t even need to be watered.

Karyn stores her Turkey Red in a special silo and sells it in batches to Blue Grouse co-owner Hannah Rossman, who bakes it into wholegrain sourdough bread sold throughout the region. Karyn loves the taste of the chewy, crusty loaves. Ernie confesses he’s more of a white-bread man.

They are making a little under 600 loaves today – more than usual – because in addition to the run on toilet paper, there is also apparently a run on Blue Grouse Bread. Addicts can’t imagine surviving a COVID-19 quarantine without it.

“It’s a weird time, with people freaking out and buying a lot of food,” Rossman says. “People are going a little nuts in the grocery stores.”

The Marolfs lean into the raw spring wind that blasts across Wright’s Mesa, watching their little shoots of wheat shiver and bow down to the rich wet earth.

Most store-bought breads have up to 30 ingredients. Blue Grouse Bread has just three: Flour. Water. Salt. “Sometimes olives.

Sometimes seeds,” Rossman admits. “Every once in a while, we get fancy.”

“One thing about wheat, it adapts to its environment,” Ernie says. “As long as there’s a market, we will keep planting it.”

BLUE GROUSE BREAD

Flour. Water. Salt.

Later that day, Rossman and her assistant baker Courtney Marvin stand in the yeasty floured sunlight that slants through the windows of Blue Grouse Bread on a side street in downtown Norwood, dumping bins of bread dough onto a large stainless steel work table and shaping them into loaves.

They work together with a practiced, quick, efficient rhythm, anticipating each other’s every move: chopping, weighing, preshaping, and final shaping. Each supple lobe of dough gets wrapped up in a cloth and tucked into a loaf pan to proof overnight in a walk-in fridge, before getting popped into the stone hearth oven the next morning.

Blue Grouse makes all of its breads using organic, whole wheat flour grown right in Colorado. Rossman is thrilled to have the Marolfs’ locally grown heirloom wheat in the mix now, too.

She mills the grain onsite at the new community mill house behind the bakery that was installed last fall, with the help of a U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration grant awarded to the Telluride Foundation.

Photos ( Far Left Inset & Left) by Makaela Vodopich, Desert Snow Photography

FEATURE

(Left) Blue Grouse Bread owners, Ben and Hannah Rossman.

(Right) Sajun Folsom tends to his cattle as his wife, Paula, looks on.

help of one full-time and one parttime employee, they bake up to 2,000 loaves of bread each week and deliver it to 20-30 wholesale accounts – a mixture of restaurants and grocery stores – in Norwood, Telluride, Montrose, and Ridgway.

Rossman began her local baking adventures as an intern at Indian Ridge Bakery in 2009 and returned as a baker in 2013 – right at the height of the “bread is evil,” anti-gluten, anti-carb craze. But Rossman kept the faith. “It’s been ingrained in me that bread is important,” she says.

So far, they have fended off the pressure to scale up. “Both Ben and I like being part of the thread,” Rossman says. “Bread should be made on a small scale. I think the food you produce should be distributed in your own community.

Food security is so important.”

A sourdough takes on the flavor of its place. Rossman’s spontaneously rises now because there is so much wild yeast in the bakery air. “If you eat enough bread, you can’t live without it,” she grins.

She and her cousin Ben Rossman launched Blue Grouse Bread in 2016. Today, with the

If grins could leaven bread, hers would do the trick.

Telluride Foundation

• 70 • 20th Anniversary Issue

LAID BACK RANCH

It’s a lot of work, but he wouldn’t raise his cattle any other way.

Striding across a hay field a few miles away, first-generation rancher Sajun Folsom grins just as brightly when he catches sight of his favorite cow, a tawny beauty with liquid brown eyes and a velvet nose.

Folsom was working as a welder in California when he first came to Norwood to help his Aunt Mae with her small ranching operation about 10 years ago. He remembers the “ah ha” moment when he was standing in a ditch staring up at the Lone Cone and wondered, “Why would I want to do anything else?”

Soil. Grass. Cows.

“She’s a good mom,” he says, “and pretty soon, she’ll be having another calf.”

Folsom runs a small herd of cattle on a patchwork of land he leases from larger, historic Norwood ranches.

His grass-fed beef has been a hit at the Telluride Farmers Market, and he is experimenting with a number of ranching practices that run counter to the traditional way of ranching in southwestern Colorado, such as mob grazing and calving in the summer rather than late winter.

A passion for raising animals humanely and naturally brought Folsom and his wife Paula together while they were both interning at Indian Ridge Farm and Bakery in 2011. By that time, Folsom was raising a few all-natural steers he had purchased from his aunt.

In 2015, on a hunch that there was a market for locally raised grassfed beef in the Telluride area, they took over his Aunt Mae’s herd

FEATURE

GROWI N G LOC AL

and turned what they loved into a business. Laid Back Ranch was born.

Ranch headquarters are on a 200acre half-wooded, hilly spread they recently bought near the top of Norwood Hill, with a modest house and 45 shares of ditch water – enough to launch a permaculture operation someday.

The hay fields spread out like a tawny quilt across Wright’s Mesa, as the Lone Cone shimmers on the horizon. Folsom’s letting the fields lay fallow for now, to restore the grass and the soil after the hard drought year of 2018.

marketplace for local producers, with the goal of increasing the overall volume of local goods being grown and consumed.

to have that backup system in place,” she says. “Access to food and self-sufficiency is really important in this day and age.”

It’s more than a grocery store where you can buy really good, affordable, locally grown food. It is also a social hub and the conduit for the Telluride Foundation’s Local Food Initiative. The attached commercial kitchen supports a broad range of programming from cooking classes to senior lunches.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE FOODSHED

Hub organizers are always looking for more strategies to better connect fresh local food with low-income individuals, such as the Double Ups Bucks program that matches federally subsidized EBT (foot stamps) purchases with up to $20 per visit in fresh produce.

“Cattle are not my biggest asset.

Soil and grass are my biggest asset,” he says. “It would be so much better if everyone had a garden and some animals.”

Mel Eggers from the Apple Core Project is one of the Hub’s board members. She works with the West End Economic Development Corporation on the expansion of smallscale farming in the region. Her main focus right now is helping distribute local food from the Hub to Telluride residents through online marketing and weekly delivery runs.

FRESH FOOD HUB

Community. Provisions. Resilience.

Photo Courtesy of Apple Core Project

It all comes together at the FRESH Food Hub, a little blue house-turnedfood-co-op in downtown Norwood, where many local food producers find a market for their products.

Here you can find apples from the heritage orchards of the West End, nurtured with water from the CCC ditch; bags of Karyn Marolf’s locally grown and milled flour; fresh-baked loaves of Blue Grouse Bread; freezers full of beef from Laid Back Ranch; jars of homemade kimchi and Thornycroft Bakery’s famous hand pies.

(Top) The FRESH Food Hub in Norwood.

(Bottom Left) Freshly grown local produce at the Hub. (Bottom Right) Jen Nelson inspects one of the heritage fruit trees on her farm in Nucla.

“The San Miguel watershed should have a thriving agricultural economy,” she says. “The fact that we have Telluride nearby means we have a market that has a lot of potential.

We are hoping to create a demand, which will grow new farmers. It is now or never.”

On this day, people are buzzing around the little store, as they stock up on bulk food items and other essentials.

Hub co-founder and Local Food Initiative coordinator Leila Seraphin bustles in, thinking out loud about vulnerable supply chains and the importance of access to locally grown food.

“I wish that the local food scene was farther along than it is right now; it’s so important

The Hub creates an economic

Telluride Foundation

• 72 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Telluride Foundation

Here. Now. Tomorrow.

Back in Nucla, Nelson and Eggers walk the old Lundahl farm, looking for clues from its past.

A lot of the old orchard has been cleared for pasture but on Eggers’ half of the 40 acres, there are still some apple, plum and pear trees, and a single lonely peach tree that produces 20 yummy peaches near the old farmhouse.

Nelson’s neighboring land has apricot, apple, peach, plum and mulberry trees. “I haven’t found any pear yet,” she says, but she probably will. The plum trees are over by the old chicken coop. She has also been finding walnut shells.

“Either something is stashing them from another place, or there is a walnut tree I don’t know about yet,” she speculates.

This long-neglected land is still fruitful, but it’s not quite tame. Bears and mountain lions come down off the Uncompahgre Plateau through the orchards and into town. At the back of the farm, up on the knob where Nelson’s house is now, there is a nice sweeping view of the whole area – and a ton of arrowheads.

That gets them thinking about the deep human history on this land they are now part of, and the agricultural renaissance they are helping to cultivate in the West End. Regardless of what is happening in the world around them, Eggers and Nelson agree: there has never been a better time to get back to the roots of local food production, and to plant new seedlings that can spread their tendrils against a future sky.

TF

• 73 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

HOW OUR WORK IS FUNDED

FOUNDATION IN FOCUS

The Telluride Foundation is unique in that it has never had an endowment, nor accumulated assets for the purpose of establishing an endowment in the future. We inject the capital we raise each year right back into the community – in real time. With this approach, since our inception, the Foundation has provided over $65 million in financial support to the region to support nonprofits, community needs, and various initiatives.

We address issues in today’s dollars to maximize the impact of today’s donor gifts, rather than setting funds aside and spending a few pennies over time. This approach is in our DNA; it is how we do our work, attack an issue, and partner with our incredible donors and community partners to make more possible.

Our fundraising approach has two tracks: individual donor contributions and grants from foundations and other entities.

Together, these two funding streams fuel the engine that propels our work.

our grant making and capacity building and provide seed capital for various initiatives and operations.

Grants from private foundations and state and federal sources also bolster many of our initiatives.

Individual donors’ multi-year unrestricted contributions support

Unrestricted donors’ gifts are critical to our work because

The Foundation has four giving tiers for individual donors to consider: Telluride Friend, Gold Hill, Bridal Veil, and First Tracks.

However, we welcome any donation, at any level, to support our work. In fact, we have received donations as meaningful as $1!

communities’ needs are constantly changing and evolving. Today’s concerns give way to tomorrow’s issues. Unrestricted gifts allow the Foundation to act strategically and efficiently with a long-term view, while at the same time respond to our region’s most pressing needs.

a bequest program for donors who want to sustain the community through their estate plan. Telluride Forever is our effort to more fully engage our donors, while ensuring the sustainability of essential nonprofit partners and innovative initiatives.

In 2016, the Telluride Foundation Board of Directors launched a new fundraising program called “Telluride Forever.” Through this program, donors can invest in innovative initiatives to help shape, improve, and preserve a more prosperous future in the region.

Telluride Forever also incorporates

Telluride Forever gifts can be unrestricted or specified and can be spent in the present or in the future.

If a Forever gift is unrestricted, it will allow the Foundation to use its expertise and community knowledge to determine where the need is greatest in the community.

If the gifts are specified, we will

Telluride Foundation

work with donors to match their interests with our existing initiatives and programs or investigate the feasibility of creating new initiatives.

Donor advised, designated, and other funds, along with planned and income gifts, are part of our expertise to help donors fulfill their giving objectives. The top legal and estate advisers in the state are part of the Foundation’s team of advisors for its donors.

We invite you to get in touch to learn more about how you can support the community through the work of the Telluride Foundation.

• 75 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Our grant categories and their corresponding desired outcome include:

ARTS & CULTURE

One of the core programs of the Telluride Foundation is Community Grants, which provide financial support to area nonprofits. These grants sustain vital programs and enhance our community, providing support to the programs that make our region so special: critical safety net operations, quality arts and cultural experiences, and opportunities for children and youth to thrive.

The Foundation awards Community Grants, always focused on measurable outcomes; in addition to grants, we strive to strengthen organizations through capacity building and technical assistance.

Participatory and quality art experiences

EDUCATION

Develop 21st century learning skills for kids and adults

ATHLETICS

Participation that leads to life skills

ENVIRONMENT & ANIMALS

Protect and preserve our surrounding natural assets

HEALTH

Improved health status of the region’s population

BY CATEGORY

Please visit our website for a complete searchable database of the Foundation’s grant-making over the last 20 years.

GRANT AWARDS

HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: 28%

2018

COMMUNITY GRANTS

FOUNDATION IN FOCUS

ARTS & CULTURE: 18% EDUCATION: 18% EARLY CHILDHOOD: 16% ATHLETICS: 15% ENVIRONMENT & ANIMALS: 5%

Telluride Foundation

• 77 • 20th Anniversary Issue

EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

Increase child school readiness

HUMAN SERVICE

A strong safety net that builds opportunity

Consolidated Statement of FOUNDATION IN FOCUS

Financial Position

The Telluride Foundation’s financial health and management are fundamental to our success and impact. We practice what we preach. We conduct an annual financial audit and adhere to the highest standards of nonprofit and foundation accounting procedures and policies.

The Foundation is consistently among the top 10 foundations across the nation when it comes to grantmaking turnover (ratio of revenues to making grants) and per capita individual giving.

19 20

O PR

GRAM

TO OVER HE

AD

RA TI

O

gra ese (Grants & xpens Ini mE

10%

AS S E T S

2019

2018

Cash and cash equivalents

5,844,034

6,502,896

Accounts receivable, net

1,097,482

996,908

Prepaid expense

41,683

25,415

and allowance for bad debts

5,154,581

3,025,473

Investments

5,129,526

5,378,434

Note receivable

238,247

183,656

Property and equipment, net

431,540

428,825

TOTAL ASSETS

$17,937,093

$16,541,607

Grants payable

1,259,335

1,418,560

Accounts payable and accrued expenses

228,191

195,275

Loan payable

1,300

-

TOTAL LIABILITIES

$1,488,826

$1,613,835

Without donor restrictions

7,498,534

8,863,287

Undesignated

7,498,534

8,863,287

With donor restrictions

3,795,152

3,039,012

Purpose restriction

5,154,581

3,025,473

Pledges received in future periods

8,949,733

6,064,485

Total with donor restrictions

TOTAL NET ASSETS

$16,448,267

$14,927,772

TOTAL LIABILITIES & NET ASSETS

$17,937,093

$16,541,607

Pledges & grants receivable, net of discount

L I AB I L I T I E S & N E T AS S E T S

Pro

90%

tiat iv es

)

O

ve

r he

ad

(Adm

i n i s t ra t i o n & Fu nd

ing

)

FOUNDATION FINANCIALS

December 31, 2019 and 2018

N E T AS S E T S

Total without donor restrictions

Telluride Foundation

• 79 • 20th Anniversary Issue

F OU N DAT I O N FI N A N C I A L S

2019 Without Donor

With Donor

Restrictions

Restrictions

Contributions & Grants

3,960,994

3,534,019

Federal Contract Revenue

1,015,050

-

Dividends & Interest

344,426

Other Income

626,080

R E VE NU E & SU PPORT

2018 Total

Without Donor

With Donor

Total

Restrictions

Restrictions

7,495,013

3,645,465

3,084,512

6,729,977

1,015,050

863,821

-

863,821

-

344,426

586,985

-

586,985

12,099

638,179

363,661

13,706

377,367

FUN FACTS

Net assets released from restrictions

Satisfaction of time restrictions

(506,500)

506,500

-

1,215,167

(1,215,167)

-

Satisfaction of program restrictions

1,167,370

(1,167,370)

-

1,049,906

(1,049,906)

-

6,607,420

$2,885,248

$9,492,668

$7,725,005

$833,145

$8,558,150

TOTAL REVENUE & SUPPORT

EX PE NSES

DID YOU

KNOW? POPULATION WE SERVE

By Community

Program Services:

Grants & Assistance Programs

6,106,815

-

6,106,815

5,093,057

-

5,093,057

Education & Consulting

291,638

-

291,638

246,534

-

246,534

$6,398,453

-

$6,398,453

$5,339,591

-

$5,339,591

Rico

Development

374,124

-

374,124

309,671

-

309,671

Telluride

318,965

-

318,965

297,857

-

297,857

$693,089

-

$693,089

$607,528

-

$607,528

$7,091,542

-

$7,091,542

$5,947,119

-

$5,947,119

Total Program Services Support Services: General & Administrative

Total Support Services

TOTAL EXPENSES

Mtn. Village

Norwood

CH ANGE IN NET ASSET S FRO M O PERAT IONS

(484,122)

2,885,248

2,401,126

1,777,886

833,145

2,611,031

Nucla

Non-operating Activities:

Realized & Unrealized Investment Losses, Net

(730,631)

-

(730,631)

95,485

-

95,485

Investments in TVA Companies

(150,000)

-

(150,000)

(205,431)

-

(205,431)

CHANGE IN NET ASSETS

($1,364,753)

$2,885,248

$1,520,495

$1,667,940

$833,145

$2,501,085

NET ASSETS, BEGINNING OF YEAR

$8,863,287

$6,064,485

$14,927,772

$7,195,347

$5,231,340

$12,426,687

NET ASSETS, END OF YEAR

$7,498,534

$8,949,733

$16,448,267

$8,863,287

$6,064,485

$14,927,772

Telluride Foundation

Naturita

Ouray

• 80 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Telluride Foundation

Ridgway

• 81 • 20th Anniversary Issue

266 2426 1434 526 717 539 1013 973

R E COG N I T I ON

FRIENDS OF TELLURIDE

FIRST TRACKS

Fletcher & Liz McCusker

Adam & Diane Max

Community Banks of Colorado

Adam & Diane Max

Chris & Laura Pucillo

Lou & Bonnie Cohen

Ron & Joyce Allred

Casey & Megan McManemin

Howard & Debbie Schiller

John Mike & Marcia Cohen

Richard Betts

Telluride Properties

Alpine Bank

John & Laura Olson

Ed & Darenda Sheridan

Richard Cornelius & Lynn Brubaker

Lars & Annie Carlson

Christopher & Noelle Whitestone

Joe & Anne Andrew

Steven Plofker & Bobbi Brown

Dan & Sheryl Tishman

Sally Puff Courtney & Jim Harley

Charles & Sue Cobb

Rick Young & Bonnie Beamer

Curt & Libba Anderson

Chris & Laura Pucillo

Anonymous

Deedee & Peter Decker

Damon & Elaine Demas

Mike & Anne Armstrong

Henry & Susan Samueli

Bill & Katrine Formby

Mark & Terrie Dollard

Carol Armstrong

Howard & Debbie Schiller

Tim & Brandie Gehan

Erik & Josephine Fallenius

John & Laura Arnold

Ed & Darenda Sheridan

Michael Goldberg &

Jack Gilbride & Judy Evans

Anonymous

David & Maire Baldwin

Pamela Smith

Chris & Patti Arndt

Ashley Hayward

Ken Grodberg

Eric & Shannon Bass

Ed & Frances Barlow

Elliot Steinberg

Exceptional Stays

High Country Beverage

Ken Grossinger &

Lynne Beck

Barney & Carol Barnett

Gene & Tracy Sykes

Jim & Laurel Fredlake

Carol & John Keogh

Micheline Klagbrun

John & Rosemary Braniff

Harmon & Joanne Brown

Dan & Sheryl Tishman

Ken Goldman & Jodi Jacobs

Land Title Guarantee Company

John & Ellen Grimes

Norman & Elaine Brodsky

Stuart & Joanna Brown

Harlan & Carol Waksal

Laurel & Danny Harlin

Mark & Debbie Lieberman

Matthew Hintermeister

Peter & Linda Bynoe

Tingate & Mandie Jue

Mark & Kim Lowes

George & Becky Harvey

Charles Conner

Peter & Laura Klekamp

Lumiere Telluride

Chris & Julie Hill

Day Family Foundation

John & Bridgett Macaskill

Jay & Becca Markley

Kevin & Kristin Holbrook

Brian & Penny Dyson

Kevin & Mary Grace Burke

TELLURIDE FOREVER

John & Alice Butler Gary Cantor

GOLD HILL

David & Kate Wadley Clint & Susan Viebrock

PATRONS

Laura Chang & Arnie Chavkin

Ron & Joyce Allred

Vincent & Anne Mai

Michael & Yvonne Marsh

Peter Jamar

Bob & Tricia End

Brian & Karen Conway

Carol Armstrong

Kenneth & Elena Marks

George & Julie Parker

Dan & Lynn Jansen

Bernard Hatcher &

Mark & Susan Dalton

Mike & Anne Armstrong

Gally & David Mayer

Peter Richardson

Rich & Charlotte Jorgensen

Stephanie Anagnostou

Dick Ebersol & Susan Saint James

Ed & Frances Barlow

Beth McLaughlin

Randy & Leslie Root

Ken & Patricia Krueger

Hill & Bettie Hastings

Bruce & Bridgitt Evans

Barney & Carol Barnett

Fred & Lisa Orlan

John & Laura Shields

Paul & Lois Major

Joe & Lynne Horning

Carl & Judy Ferenbach

Joanne & Harmon Brown

Lisa Payne

Gary & Susan Sowyrda

James & Cindy McMorran

Bill & Jane Janke

Kathleen Fisher

John & Alice Butler

Debra Peacock

Morgan Smith & Sarah

Harvey & Gwen Mogenson

Arthur & Paige Nagle

Tully & Elise Friedman

Laura Chang & Arnie Chavkin

John & Thalia Pryor

Lavender Smith

Brian O’Neill

Don & Nancy Orr

Tom & Janine Hill

Brian & Karen Conway

Steve Raymond

TD & Page Smith

John & Kris Perpar

Jeff & Debbie Resnick

The Herrick Family

Mark & Susan Dalton

Travis & Alison Spitzer

Tom & Donna Stone

Ken & Jan Reynolds

Paul Lehman & Ronna Stamm

Paul & Janet Hobby

Bruce & Bridgitt Evans

Bobby & Polly Stein

Robert & Anneli Thiebaut

Mark Rosenthal &

Grace Jones Richardson Trust

Dan & Mary James

Davis & Bobsey Fansler

Jack & Janet Wolinetz

Shoshannah Pollack

Resturante Rustico

Jesse & Mary Johnson

Carl & Judy Ferenbach

Paul & Aleta Zoidis

Stewart Seeligson

Joel & Patricia Siger

Jim Johnson

Tully & Elise Friedman

Brian Wolahan

Jim & Joanne Steinback

Matt & Elizabeth Sommers

Jeff Katz & Christina Casas

Tom & Janine Hill

Anonymous

Jim & Judy Singleton

John & Carolyn Snow

Marty & Tristin Mannion

Jesse & Mary Johnson

Chris & Erin Busbee

Lisa Ungar

Carli Zug & Steve Szymanski

Telluride Foundation

BRIDAL VEIL

• 82 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Telluride Foundation

• 83 • 20th Anniversary Issue

R E COG N I T I ON

Telluride Brewing Company

Chang Chavkin Scholars

Dudley & Tina Taft

Rocky Mountain Health

Mike Armstrong

Mandy Miller

Jon & Mary Beth Tukman

Kiernan Family Fund

Dan & Sheryl Tishman

Foundation

Sara Bachman

Ximena Rebolledo León

John & Carolyn Snow

Sparky Latina Scholarship Fund

Walton Family Foundation

Ed Barlow

Megan McManemin

Carli Zug & Steve Szymanski

Elaine Fischer Visual Arts

INITIATIVES &

The Colorado Trust

Laila Benitez

Chris Pucillo

Reese Henry & Company

Scholarship Fund

GRANT SUPPORT

Laura J Musser Fund

Lynne Beck

Brian O’Neill

Energy Outreach Colorado

Richard Betts

Dan Tishman

Caring for Colorado Foundation

US Department of Commence,

Joanne Brown

DelanieYoung

The Colorado Health Foundation

Economic Development

Arnie Chavkin

Price Family Fund

DIRECTED FUNDS

Scott Spencer Memorial Fund

Anne’s Rainbow Skate Fund

NEIL ARMSTRONG

Westmeath Foundation

Administration (EDA)

Karen Conway

2020

Strokes of Genius

SCHOLARSHIP

High Meadows Foundation

Corporation for National

Danny Craft

ANNIVERSARY

Scholarship Fund

FOUNDERS

Johnson Family Foundation

& Community Service -

Mark Dalton

HOSTS

Saul Zaentz Foundation

AmeriCorps VISTA

Deedee Decker

Neil Armstrong Scholarship Fund Monica Callard Fund

Carol Armstrong

Tukman Family Fund

US Department of Agriculture

Bridgitt Evans

Mike & Anne Armstrong

The Hoot Fund

Mike & Anne Armstrong

El Pomar Foundation

Rural Development

Davis Fansler

Harmon & Joanne Brown

McManemin Family Fund

Joanne & Harmon Brown

Boettcher Foundation

Enterprise Community Partners

Carl Ferenbach

Arnie Chavkin & Laura Chang

Knox Family Fund

Charles & Sue Cobb

Gates Family Foundation

Tri-State Generation &

Tully Friedman

Mark & Susan Dalton

The Levy Fund

Mark & Susan Dalton

Anschutz Family Foundation

Transmission Association

J. Tomilson Hill

Tully & Elise Friedman

Hermitage Fund

Dick & Joyce Farmer

The Watt Family

Kevin Holbrook

Jeff Katz & Christina Casas

Good Neighbor Fund

Tully & Elise Friedman

Goldman Family Charitable Fund

BOARD OF

Kris Holstrom

Adam & Diane Max

San Miguel Kids Endowment

Tom & Janine Hill

Colorado Dept. of Economic

DIRECTORS

Dan Jansen

Chris & Laura Pucillo

Johnson Family Fund

Thomas & Francie Hiltz

Development & Trade

Jesse Johnson

Howard & Debbie Schiller

West End Pay It Forward Trust

Dan & Marilyn Quayle

Colorado Dept. of Local Affairs

Ron Allred

Paul Major

Dan & Sheryl Tishman

Rico Legacy Endowment

John & Carolyn Snow

Newman’s Own Foundation

Anne Andrew

Sage Martin

Lone Cone Legacy Trust

Barry Sonnenfeld & Susan Ringo

Colorado Impact Fund

Carol Armstrong

Tricia Maxon

IN MEMORIAM Adam Max

Philanthropist

Telluride Foundation

Neil Armstrong

Astronaut

• 84 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Richard Holbrooke

Ambassador

Stephen Wald

Philanthropist, Telluride Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient

H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Bill Carstens

Developer

Foundation Co-Chair, Army General

Telluride Foundation

• 85 • 20th Anniversary Issue

Father Sylvester Schoening

Catholic Priest

Photo Courtesy of Telluride Ski Resort

PERSPECTIVE

REFLECT INSPIRE PREPARE

Telluride Foundation

• 86 • 20th Anniversary Issue

n spite of our differences, this landscape holds us all together.

Its cracks and fissures and erosions are what make it beautiful.

Through philanthropy and leadership, the Telluride Foundation seeks to be the connective tissue that helps all of our region’s residents survive and thrive in this challenging, magnificent environment.

I

Telluride Foundation

• 87 • 20th Anniversary Issue

PERSPECTIVE

OF THE

Photo by Harvey Mogenson

THE FUTURE

stability. I had no plans of living here for the long-term and aimed to stay only for the winter season, working as a server in the lucrative up-scale restaurants of town.

However, as my time at home progressed, I began to fall back in love with the community of Telluride. I met driven, motivated people who weren’t working in the service or property industries, and began to sink into a culture of activity, civic engagement, belonging, and healthy living.

REGION

By SHEAMUS CROKE

Strong Neighbors Coordinator, AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer, 2019 - 2020

I suppose I used to share some of this frustration, but my perspective shifted after spending a number of years outside of the box canyon and getting a change in global scenery.

Witnessing intense poverty and studying economic development changed my view of economic growth. I began to see Telluride not only as a wealthy bustling ski town, but also as a place in the fortunate position of being more concerned with regulating and controlling growth than incentivizing it.

Nucla, a community I grew up visiting and where my mother now lives, currently faces the opposite challenge, with the potential loss of roughly 70 percent of its tax base after the recent closure of the coalfired power plant outside of town.

Telluride Foundation

After engraining myself back within the Telluride community and its surrounding region, I have gained a much deeper appreciation for not only the circumstances Telluride exists in, but also for all the moving parts and work that is done to make communities like this special.

Telluride and the West End are both changing, in their own ways, but this change brings an exciting future.

If two years ago someone asked me if I would move back home to Telluride, I would have likely told them something along the lines of “I don’t think so; it’s really small and I don’t know if it’s what I’m looking for.”

However, in December 2018 I moved back on a whim after six months of traveling in South America, with the main goal of finding financial

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Before long, I was seeking a more fulfilling and impact-driven position in my rediscovered hometown. The Strong Neighbors Initiative Americorp Vista position at the Telluride Foundation immediately caught my eye. It provided the opportunity to not only work in a field I had always been interested in, but also give back to the communities that have shaped me into who I am.

Photos (Right & Bottom) by Rob Gowler

Telluride, like most places, has changed a lot in the past 24 years. It is not uncommon to encounter the crusty local that tells you how much better everything used to be, citing an influx of tourists and seasonal mayhem as chief complaints.

I have begun to mesh into the cogs that make Telluride more than a resort town, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Yes, Telluride and the surrounding communities are changing, but I find this exciting.

I look forward to spending each day instilling more meaning into the wonderful place we are fortunate to call home.

(Top) Tri-State recently shuttered its coal-fired power plant in Nucla.

(Middle) The West End of Montrose County provides miles of wild and remote trails.

(Bottom) Rock climbing in Paradox Valley.

Telluride Foundation

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PERSPECTIVE

PE RS PE C TIVE

REFLECTIONS ON THE

FOUNDATION

By ANNE SLAUGHTER ANDREW

Board Member, Past Grants Committee Chair

What distinguishes Telluride from so many breathtakingly beautiful ski resorts? Some may say the uniqueness of our box canyon location. Others may say the rich history of our town. Still others may think of the renown of our many festivals. For me, what distinguishes Telluride and our surrounding area is the enduring sense of community.

I feel immeasurably lucky to have been able to learn about our community and contribute to supporting, strengthening, and celebrating that community as a board member and donor to the Telluride Foundation.

As Chair of the Telluride Foundation Grants Committee, I have had a chance to learn about the many challenges our community faces – from advancing better quality early childhood education in Telluride to coordinating care for the elderly in Nucla/Naturita. I’ve been able to meet the community leaders across our region who are so invested in taking care of our community needs – from the executive director at the Sheridan Opera House to the volunteers who run the food bank in Ridgway.

The partnership between the

Telluride Foundation

Foundation and these community leaders and their organizations is extraordinary. The Foundation invests its resources in being a strategic partner with the community, bringing financial resources and, just as importantly, the human resources of its staff and board. The Foundation has invested in our community organizations, helping them to build capacity to lead and expand their impact. The Foundation’s commitment to innovation and the Telluride Venture Accelerator have injected a new level of energy and excitement for the region’s economic development. The Foundation’s commitment to building resiliency in our rural communities has not only transformed these communities but has been recognized nationally.

When we bought our home in Telluride almost 10 years ago, our hope was to be able to contribute to a community that we thought was quite special. Thanks to the Telluride Foundation, that dream has come true. And while I know that there are still many challenges ahead, including addressing affordable housing, the sense of community that defines the Telluride Foundation and drives its vision forward will endure.

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WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST TAVARES STRACHAN

Conceptual artist Tavares Strachan is at work planning a temporary public neon art installation titled “We Are In This Together” that will be viewed while riding the gondola between Telluride and Mountain Village.

Please share your first impressions of Telluride?

TS: Having been born and raised on an island, I had the luxury of being raised in an exceptional landscape. Telluride reminded me of home in so many ways. There is an unspoken respect for the natural world that I admire.

How would you describe your approach to producing a site-specific artwork in Telluride’s public domain?

TS: Spending time and developing a relationship with the place is important, including building networks and merging with the human beings living in a place.

The work begins by forming these connections and relationships.

This project seeks to bring the community together and to add to the narrative of the Telluride region.

It is the product of research over a five year period. We are interested in shedding light on local issues around housing, climate, food, education and immigration and coming together to research and address some of these questions at a local level that resonates more broadly in our current climate. In this moment of nationalism, it’s particularly difficult to manage any global issue without zooming in on local issues and the reverse is true.

At what point did you determine a neon sculpture on the mountainside would be the gesture you wanted to make at this site?

TS: When I realized that this is a location only visible if you were on the mountain and somewhere that would be least obtrusive to the skyline.

The project titled “We are in

Telluride Foundation

this together” is being staged at a highly charged cultural and political moment. How do you see the role of the artist in light of this divisiveness?

TS: It’s important to believe in something; it’s also important to follow your instincts. As social organisms, who are we if we are not together?

What would the ideal outcome of this project be at a local level?

TS: The hope would be that the discussion surrounding the project would prompt responses that would reverberate in the community beyond the life of the public art installation. The goal would be for the intervention to incite action on a social impact and philanthropic level in the areas the project intends to highlight from education equality to climate change and impact.

The project serves as a call for unity. Do you view this as a utopic proposition or...

TS:

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A call to action.

WHERE DO YOU SEE OUR COMMUNITY

“Norwood will be blossoming.

The community will be vibrant and rich, and we’ll be the happiest town in the world.”

RUBY, 15,

Norwood

I’m not sure what Telluride will look like in 25 years, but I know there will still be trees.

CHARLIE, 6,

BRYCE, 5,

Telluride

“I think we will be doing more with technology to make the world a better place.”

EMILY, 16,

Photo by Sage Carver

“Maybe it will be like a teenager land? The clock tower will change to an old grandfather clock. And maybe the chairlift will come off the lift so you can ski on it and it goes right back to the lift.”

Ridgway

“Maybe with more dirtbike trails and a waterslide and swimming pool.”

CORBYN, 6,

Telluride Foundation

Nucla

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Telluride

Photo by Sage Carver

Photo Courtesy of Telluride Mountain School

IN 25 YEARS?

“We might have more than five girls in our class.”

RYNN, 8,

Nucla

Telluride will look very strange. Cars will only have three wheels, and everyone will be riding bicycles.

VITALIJA, 6,

Telluride

Photo by Lisa Wright

Photo by Kaycee K. Joubert, Real Life Photographs

PERSPECTIVE

Photo by Ryan Bonneau

FAST FORWARD The Telluride Foundation is making more possible here, now, and tomorrow. We are committed to shaping the future, together, so what’s next? To be continued‌.

SPECIAL THANKS

Penn Newhard Backbone Media

Harvey Mogenson Photographer

Aurelie Slegers Photographer

Samantha Tisdel Wright Anniversary Edition Writer/Editor

Ryan Bonneau Photographer

Makaela Vodopich Photographer

April Montgomery Anniversary Edition Editor

Noah Clark Anniversary Edition Design

TELLURIDE FOUNDATION

220 E. Colorado Avenue Suite 106, PO BOX 4222 Telluride, CO 81435

info@telluridefoundation.org | p: (970) 728 8717 | f: (970) 728 9007