Colorado Humanities

Background Statement

A MESSAGE FROM OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Thank you for considering a donation to Colorado Humanities today. Support from people like you is critical to ensuring our mission of providing programming that celebrates diverse cultures and encourages a love of learning regardless of your age.

If you are on this page, it’s possible that you are already familiar with at least one of Colorado Humanities’ programs, but I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about a few especially wonderful programs.

Colorado Book Awards

Established in 1991, the Colorado Book Awards honors the state’s top literary talent, celebrating authors, editors, illustrators, and photographers. In the past 33 years, over 350 books have been awarded and more than 1,100 authors have been recognized. The Colorado Book Awards is an important program that educates, entertains, and honors Colorado’s literary achievement and all those who have been a part of it. CBA cultivates community spirit among book writers, producers, buyers, and readers, and is one of the most distinguished book award programs in the country.

The Five States of Colorado

Colorado Humanities, working with Denver-based HaveyPro Cinema, created a 90-minute documentary entitled The Five States of Colorado. This beautifully shot film was released in 2023 and this year won a regional Emmy for Historical Documentary.

The film is an engaging exploration and illustration of the unique history, culture, concerns, and needs of each of the five featured regions: the Eastern Plains, Southern Colorado, the Western Slope, the Front Range, and Metro Denver. The film has been widely viewed across Colorado and community conversations with a trained facilitator or expert from the film is held after each showing.

Screenings continue to be scheduled and digital access has been made available to public libraries across the state. If your group would like to schedule a screening, please contact us.

Chautauqua

Chautauqua events are held in three locations across Colorado. High Plains Chautauqua in Greeley is the longest running event, having started over 20 years ago. It takes place each year in early August and features four days and evenings of music, food, and lectures and presentations by professional Chautauquans. These scholar/performers bring to life historical characters that fit a particular theme and answer audience questions in and out of character. History Alive! Colorado West Chautauqua in Grand Junction celebrated 18 years this past September. The historical characters portrayed included Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Frances Perkins, and Cesar Chavez. Just imagine being able to ask Frederick Douglass about his meeting with Abraham Lincoln! History Live! in Durango also takes place in September as part of the month-long programming offered by the Southwest Colorado Humanities Roundtable. History Live! celebrates the humanities in Southwest Colorado with lectures, workshops, and portrayals of historical characters in the Chautauqua format. This year’s characters included Merriweather Lewis and Walt Whitman. Attendees at the Chautauqua events are often surprised at the depth of knowledge the Chautauquans have of their characters and at the emotions experienced in seeing these characters brought to life. If you have an opportunity to attend an event in Greeley, Grand Junction or Durango, please be sure to go.

Young Chautauqua

If you are lucky enough to attend High Plains Chautauqua or History Alive! Colorado West Chautauqua, chances are you will also get to see a student in our Young Chautauqua (YC) program. Since 2001, YC program has engaged professional Chautauquans who coach students as they research, write, prepare, and perform first-person dramatizations as historical characters in costume, then answer audience questions in and out of character. Colorado Humanities staff has created online training videos that are offered to teachers and Young Chautauqua coaches. If you think this sounds like something in which a school in your area would like to participate, please contact us.

Community Conversations

Sometimes it seems as though Americans are a divided people, whether the topic is climate change, education, immigration, or just about anything else. But if we come together to talk and listen to each other, perhaps some of that divide can be mitigated. At the national level, the National Endowment for the Humanities has encouraged this discussion. In our state, Colorado Humanities has been working to train facilitators who can help us talk about issues civilly and listen to the concerns of others as we work to find solutions to the many issues confronting Americans today. So far, Colorado Humanities has trained 91 facilitators and over 270 people have engaged in these conversations. If you would like to start a conversation in your community, please contact Colorado Humanities and we will be happy to work with you.

These are just a few of the many programs Colorado Humanities offers across the state. You can see more by exploring our website.

DONATE!

If this work is important to you, please donate generously to Colorado Humanities. We welcome and deeply appreciate your support. If you are not currently on our mailing list, please sign up to receive our newsletter, which is filled with news about upcoming events. We hope to see you at one of our many programs soon!

Debra Kalish, Board Chair

***

MORE ABOUT COLORADO HUMANITIES

We believe humanities education is fundamental to democratic societies, and vital to a thriving Colorado.

We believe the humanities are for everyone.

We believe the humanities are for you.

Why? The humanities preserve our valued traditions and transmit them from generation to generation. The humanities listen to the voices of many generations and share them through history, literature, philosophy, ethics, religion, languages, archaeology, and all the other areas of thought and culture that make up the record of human activity.

The humanities have practical applications for everyday life. They offer individuals and societies the opportunity to test ideas or actions and to imagine their consequences. The humanities provide a context for envisioning the impact—positive and negative—of new ideas in our cultural, political, and social lives. They benefit people by helping them to think about and to consider life’s surprises and challenges before they happen and by giving strength when they do happen. The humanities help us to make informed decisions.

The humanities help us answer big questions. What is the meaning, value, and purpose of human life? What is justice? What is equality? What is freedom? How might a just society function? How do individuals relate to the state and society? What are the moral consequences of human action? Why do both cruelty and good exist? How do people best work together?

Learning in the humanities contributes to our individual and collective wisdom and vision. It helps us to understand and interpret politics, religion, economics, ethics, international relations, and social and community values. It clarifies our roles as citizens in a democratic society, and encourages our informed participation in our communities.

Learning in the humanities opens us to the experiences of others and allows us to understand what we haven’t experienced ourselves, gives us the means to recognize the common ground shared by all varieties of human thought and endeavor and to bring about connections among them.

We believe in our work to further community-based humanities learning. From all our board, staff, program partners, and program participants, thank you for believing in it too, for being a part of our family of friends and supporters, and for donating today.

Colorado Humanities, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was established in 1974, nine years after the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act was signed into law and the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) was founded. We are one of 56 humanities councils, and joined the Federation of State Humanities Councils when it was established in 1977. Our focus is to design and implement humanities programs, community conversations, resources, and other activities. We have forged hundreds of community partnerships, and have created more than 100 unique educational initiatives in our 50-year history. Our dynamic humanities programs stimulate informed civic dialogue, community engagement, and life-long learning. We reach an estimated 400,000 people each year as program partners, participants, and audiences.

Our current programs include:

Author Talks

Black History Live

Change in Rural Colorado

Changing the Legacy of Race & Ethnicity

Colorado Book Awards

Colorado Poet Laureate

Community Conversations

Facilitator Training for Reflective Conversations

The Five States of Colorado

High Plains Chautauqua

History Alive! Colorado West Chautauqua

History Live Durango: Durango Chautauqua

History Speakers Bureau

Latiné/Hispanic Partnerships

Motheread/Fatheread Colorado

Museum on Main Street/Crossroads: Change in Rural America

Young Chautauqua

Want to know more? You can read detailed descriptions of each program by scrolling down to Organizational Data and clicking "Programs" in the left hand column.