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Giving Tuesday may have paid off big for lots of Colorado organizations, but it’s hard to imagine a donation hitting bigger than the one the kids in the San Luis Valley 4-H club received when a do-gooder approached Larry Brown with a $1.25 million donation just before Thanksgiving.
And like all acts of such immense do-gooder-hood, this one is better with a story, even if the donor is anonymous.
Back in the good old days — the 1980s and ’90s — the Colorado State University Extension program in the San Luis Valley was monumental.
Brown worked there then and says there were eight or nine educators, only you didn’t call them educators back then, you called them agents. But there they were, robustly serving their mostly agricultural communities, in shiny cowboy boots and fancy neckties, from several different office locations across the region’s six counties.
Yet over the years, the program dwindled under budget cuts at the county level and CSU. And the greatest loss from that creeping death by a million cuts was funding for the 4-H program, which has been running nationally since 1902 and in the San Luis Valley since the ’20s or ’30s.
“In more robust days, we had two 4-H agents,” Brown, who now runs the San Luis Valley Extension, remembers. “Which may not be enough, but at least you can get the job done.” But that later dropped to one agent, “and there’s no way for one agent to effectively run 4-H in a six-county area and stay healthy.” So within the 12 years they tried piecing it together with one agent, five of those years there was no 4-H at all. And to hear Brown tell it, that was worse than death by a million cuts, because of all the good 4-H does for youth.
4-H: Head, Heart, Hands, Health
The four H’s in the 4-H pledge stand for Head, Heart, Hands and Health. And the pledge 4-H’ers take is to have clearer thinking, greater loyalty, larger service and better living for the benefit of their club, community, country and world.
There are 4-H clubs in just about every county and parish in the country through in-school and after-school programs, school and community clubs and 4-H camps. Kids and teens complete hands-on projects in areas like health, science, agriculture and civic engagement in a positive environment where they receive guidance from adult mentors and are encouraged to take on proactive leadership roles. And aside from it being “if not the top-rated youth development program in the country, then the world,” Brown said, “in our community specifically, it teaches kids life skills, responsibility and leadership skills. It teaches them public speaking and decision-making. It’s hands-on, learning by doing.”
Those San Luis Valley kids can choose hundreds of projects that are “life-school sorts of things,” Brown said. “From the agricultural standpoint, it’s raising livestock and showing them at the fair. On the family side, there’s projects for food preservation, food safety, cake baking — what we call the heritage arts. There’s things like crafts and sewing and knitting and crocheting, you know, trying to save and pass on some of those rural traditions. And there’s electricity, robotics, rocketry and moviemaking. I mean, the list goes on and on, and if we can’t find the right spark of interest for a kid with all of that, then there’s a self-determined project.”
Saving SLV 4-H
Clearly, Brown had to find a way to keep it going in the San Luis Valley.
In 2021, after being self-employed for a couple of decades, he came back to be the director of the CSU Extension program to see if he could help rebuild it. As he did he was able to find some funding for a second agent — but not a second 4-H agent.
So the extension decided to launch an endowment campaign that could permanently fund a second 4-H agent, without it being at the mercy of fluctuating budgets.
That was a little over two years ago, and here’s an inside joke: When they started looking into creating an endowment, the development people at CSU said, “You know, Larry, you don’t do an endowment $100 at a time or even $1,000 at a time. You do an endowment when someone walks into your office and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a million dollars that I want to leave you for an endowment.’”
He responded, “You know, in our rural San Luis Valley, where we live, the way we do things is we start where we are, with what we have, and we do the best we can.” And through 70 donations ranging from “literally $5” to $100,000, they’ve managed to raise $250,000 with pledges that’ll take them up to $300,000 by the end of the year.
But the answer to the joke, he said, was when “this $1.2 million came in, with a statement from the donor that said they were giving it because they know about 4-H and they believe in 4-H and what the kids get out of it and that sort of thing.”
So that’s the story. Except it isn’t.
What’s more important is the kids.
A combination of CSU, the San Luis Valley County Commissioner Association and the Outcalt Foundation currently fund Brown’s position as well as four agents who work with families and youth. Cody Groff, Mollie Wells, Carol Gurule and Janae Naranjo all overlap with 4-H: Groff handles a lot of the robotics stuff and STEM, Wells focuses largely on livestock and Gurule runs a program for families with kids 10 to 14 “doing family intervention sorts of things.”
Last year, they made unique contacts with around 1,000 individual kids. And of course they have their own stories, too.
A 14-year-old boy Gurule helped through one of the family programs was having a “very tough time in school.” But he found his way to welding and ended up showing his work in the San Luis Valley fair.
This year SLV 4-H sent 300 project entries and 189 livestock entries to the Colorado State Fair. Among those were 17 kids ages 8 to 17 who competed in livestock judging. They traveled 7,000 miles to competitions from Texas to Nebraska to Wyoming, said Janae Naranjo, a CSU extension family agent. When she started coaching them in 2022, and they came in dead last, she thought “whatever am I doing with my life?” But even before last year, when they ended up fifth overall, she knew exactly what it was.
Section by Tracy Ross | Reporter
Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ Colorado plans to phase out natural gas heating in homes, prompting many reader questions. We have answers. >> Read story
➔ Delayed return of federal jobs data has some Colorado economists concerned. The federal shutdown paused Bureau of Labor Statistics work for six weeks. It’s coming back slowly, though some reports have been canceled. >> Read story
➔ CU-Anschutz agrees to pay $10 million in lawsuit over COVID vaccine mandate, group says. The Thomas More Society sued the University of Colorado Anschutz in 2021 alleging that the university violated its plaintiffs’ religious freedom. >> Read story
➔ How Medicaid became such a drag on Colorado’s state budget. The state price tag of administering the program has risen dramatically in recent years, far outpacing the voter-imposed cap on government growth and spending. >> Read story
➔ Colorado awarded $420.6M by federal government — nearly half of original grant — for fast rural internet service. The state, originally awarded $826.5 million, was forced to redo its BEAD plan to give satellite and wireless a fair chance against the more costly fiber broadband service. >> Read story
➔ Colorado is auditing 1,745 licenses for immigrants driving 18-wheelers, hazardous trucks and buses. The state paused its commercial driver’s license program for immigrants with temporary legal status after a new Trump administration rule. >> Read story
Other working bits
➔ Colorado and FTC wins $24 million in misleading rents case. Of that, Greystar, the nation’s largest apartment property manager, will pay $1 million to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to cover attorneys’ fees and for future consumer protection or antitrust enforcement, according to the agreement reached between the state, the Federal Trade Commission and Greystar.
AG Phil Weiser and the FTC sued Greystar in January over hidden fees that weren’t part of the advertised apartment rent. According to the complaint, one Denver complex managed by Greystar, tenants were required to pay additional monthly fees of $25 for “valet trash service,” $5 for pest control, $5.40 for utility administration, plus one-time package locker set up fees of $20 and administration set up and closing fees of $20 each. None of that was mentioned in apartment listing ads placed on Zillow “despite Zillow.com providing a specific section to itemize fees and provide prospective tenants with an estimated monthly cost.”
In a statement Tuesday, Greystar said the agreement “contains no admission of wrongdoing” and called it a “much-needed clarity on the FTC’s expectations for advertising rental housing.” >> Read agreement
➔ Minnesota copies Colorado’s retirement program. Colorado SecureSavings, an opt-in retirement plan for workers without access to one, has signed up more than 94,000 Coloradans who’ve saved $173 million since early 2023. It’s also attracted other states that wanted their own version. Minnesota is the latest and joins Delaware, Maine, Nevada, and Vermont, said Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young. The six states call themselves the Partnership for a Dignified Retirement.
“As the partnership grows, we are building real momentum toward a future where every worker can retire with dignity,” said Young, who helped get the program started in 2020.
It’s not a traditional retirement plan where employers contribute and workers minimize taxes until retirement. Employers must register with the state and link their payroll systems. Then, workers can opt in and have a small portion of their paycheck sent to their account. It’s no ordinary savings account, though. Financial services firm Vestwell administers it for all six states. That means someone with investment expertise is looking for higher returns, unlike the meager 0.01% interest for a typical savings account.
➔ Lunar Outpost takes on its 7th mission on the moon. The Golden-based company, which has been test-driving a large lunar rover in Huerfano County, just got picked by NASA to join an Artemis IV mission that’s expected to launch in 2028. It’s the same mission that involves the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, and in partnership with University of Central Florida and the University of California, Berkeley. The smaller MAPP rover plans to carry two LASP instruments to help study lunar dust and plasma on the moon’s South Pole. >> Read up on details
➔ Colorado JOLTS is back! That’s the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which paused all reports during the longest government shutdown in history. The data was dated since it is from August.
But the report did note that Colorado had one of the largest declines in the rate of workers quitting their jobs, compared with other states. August hiring was also down from July, while layoffs were 33% higher. And while the number of job postings, at 130,000, was higher than in July, it still was down 17% compared with a year ago.
Last month, Aspen Technology Labs and the Colorado Chamber of Commerce released their report for the third quarter. The state experienced little change, with an 0.8% decline in available jobs from the second quarter. Median salaries fell 0.8% and part-time pay dropped 1.6%. That still ranked Colorado as the nation’s 12th highest for full-time median pay.
More notable, however, was the change in job openings by region. Breckenridge and Boulder grew 4% and 3%, respectively. But Grand Junction saw job openings fall 24%. Rifle declined 20%. Greeley and Pueblo fell 8%. Chamber officials said the state’s results “tracked very closely with the national market” and nothing unique to Colorado. >> See Chamber’s report
Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter
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