2018 WITH DCI: ANOTHER YEAR OF VIBRANT DOWNTOWNS
Can you believe that 2018 is almost over? We have been incredibly busy traveling around the state this year and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We want to thank all of our members, partners, and sponsors that helped make this year incredible and possible. This year we focused on growing our membership, increasing resources on our website, and expanding programs like our Urban Renewal trainings and Emerging Leader events. We are excited to continue all of this work in 2019 and some of our plans include developing Urban Renewal Case Studies, growing our VISTA program to encapsulate more of our membership base, and expanding on our Challenge Studio Program. 
We were lucky to have some great partner events this year including: two events with Happy City in Idaho Springs in January considering development impacts and best practices, a DDAs in Action Mobile tour with CML in Fort Collins and Windsor in August, and Community Building Colorado-Style Conference with many partners in Boulder in October. You can read the Happy City report here and the recap of the DDA tour here . We are always inspired by what communities and our partners are doing for community development. We also expanded our Emerging Leaders program this summer with a few events that featured speakers that are emerging leaders in their own right including topics on Millennial Transportation Habits and the revitalization of Colfax. Here are a few Testimonials from these events:
“We have loved working with DCI to help us engage the community, sharing ideas from other communities and providing resources that we can use to further our efforts in Downtown.” -Madeline VanDenHoek, Town of Monument
“The tools/ideas presented in the workshop to bring together city/county government officials, local business owners, and local residents help open the dialogue when discussing redevelopment within a community. When each party can provide a different approach to an issue within a community, a more solid & positive solution can be found.” – Idaho Springs Happy City Workshop Participant
As mentioned above, our Urban Renewal Program was enhanced this year to better provide for our Urban Renewal Partners and members. We brought board training to Northern Colorado in Fort Collins and Central Colorado in Lakewood culminating in our Southern Colorado Urban Renewal Summit in Pueblo. We also developed a resource page to house all of the training and educational materials specifically for URA’s and Districts. Through the Summit we were proud to present the idea of the Entrepreneurial URA especially for rural URAs. See what our URA members have to say:
“The session helped me to get a “big picture” view of URAs as they relate to communities, municipalities, developers and special districts”
“[My biggest takeaway from the event was] Understanding this new environment for URA creation and the cooperation and timeline necessary. ”
2018 IN THE GAME was such an inspirational, educational, and fun event. The event was full of changemakers, big thinkers, and downtown champions. This year, we showed off one of the most vibrant downtowns in the state, Boulder, through our speakers, lunches, and tours. We continued to defy the traditional “talking heads” conference with our discussions of Tourism and Entrepreneurship through different lenses, our lightning ideas from brilliant Colorado thinkers, and of course our Challenge Studio Workshops. You can see the entire recap here . We hope to continue these themes of resiliency and collaboration and we can’t wait to see you all IN THE GAME in Aspen in 2019! Registration is now open here ! Here what attendees had to say:
“This conference was refreshingly energetic. Most conferences I go to consist of people talking about things they’ve already done, but here you can be inspired by people who are doing things now – who are in the midst of a challenge.”
“I love how interactive the DCI In The Game Conference is. It’s a whirlwind week of learning and strategic planning but also celebrates community, art and culture of the host city. I will definitely go again.”
This year was an exciting year of progress as we developed our Challenge Studio program to increase the amount of support the Challenge Studio communities get before and after the conference. We started a partnership with the CU Denver School of Public Affairs to have a class of Master’s in Public Affairs students take on a Challenge Studio Community as their main project focus for the semester. We got the opportunity to visit the communities before the conference and establish background and create a report for these communities. You can read the reports here. We have also been following up with our CS Communities throughout the year with workshops relating to their challenge area including Monument and Longmont. We had an inspiring event tackling tactical urbanism in Monument in July as a follow-up to Monument’s challenge around Civic Pride. Through the CS process, DCI realized the next steps for Monument were in Tactical Urbanism to engage people, reshape space for the use of people over cars, and to just have fun telling the Monument story! You can read the recap blog here .
We are so excited for 2019 and for many more informative, innovative, and fun events. We continue to strive to serve our Colorado communities with everything we do and we hope you will be a part of the future of vibrant downtowns in Colorado. We are able to accomplish all this work through our members, partners and sponsors but we are NOT a nationally funded organization. We work FOR Colorado and to make the whole state more connected and vibrant. Which why we hope you will be able to support us on Colorado Gives Day. The day is on December 4th . You can schedule your donation now at https://coloradogives.org/downtowncoloradoinc/overview