After Building New Outdoor Skills, Teens Put Youth Leadership into Action by Planning and Leading a Backyard Overnight to Inspire the Next Generation of Campers Recently, our Casa de la Esperanza teens spent two days putting their newly developed camping skills to the test. They paddled across a windy lake, cooked meals from scratch, slept… Read more »
The Casa Teen Outdoor Leadership Experience Helped Participants Build Confidence, Strengthen Friendships, and Prepare to Mentor the Next Generation of Campers For the past few days, our group of Casa de la Esperanza teens has been getting ready for our camping adventure. We spent our time getting to know each other even better (no small… Read more »
An Intergenerational Program for Teens, Parents, and Kids at Casa de la Esperanza Helps Families Connect, Camp, and Grow Together. Written by Senior CAP Instructor Erin Angel. We want to share with you some of the magic of the Casa de la Esperanza (Casa) Familias Unidas en la Naturaleza (FUN) Intergenerational Program and how it… Read more »
Cottonwood Institute (CI) has been so grateful for our amazing partnership with Casa de la Esperanza (Casa) in Longmont, CO, for the past 13 years! This year, we decided to kick our collaboration up a notch by co-creating the Familias Unidas en la Naturaleza (FUN) Program, a new program to inspire youth and their… Read more »
Escrito en español más abajo. Written by Cottonwood Institute instructor M Tormasi. As the summer solstice neared, Cottonwood Institute instructors excitedly met up with folks from Casa de la Esperanza in Longmont. The camping trip ahead would include a no-lights-allowed night hike, a service project, and even meeting rescued wolves up close and personal. That’s… Read more »
Escrito en español más abajo. Written by Cottonwood Institute instructor Tucker Knight. See more photos here! A group of middle and high schoolers from the Casa de Esperanza program joined Cottonwood Institute for an adventure! The students were wrapping up a week-long program and concluded it with a hike and small celebration. It was a… Read more »
Written by CI Field Instructor Aileen Palma (Escrito en español más abajo) Time flies when you’re having fun…Erin and Aileen had the pleasure of working with a group of students from Casa de La Esperanza for a short two weeks before we geared up for a culminating day hike. Although the students grew up together, this didn’t… Read more »
Cottonwood Institute has always promoted a life of learning, loving, and living nature. This means disconnecting from our ever-connected devices and reconnecting to the natural world through all of our senses. We encourage our students to observe animal behaviors, to listen to whispers of the wind through the trees, to feel the texture of the… Read more »
The students from Casa de la Esperanza experienced a lot of new things this summer. For most of them, their camping trip with Cottonwood Institute in Rocky Mountain National Park was their first time camping or hiking. For some of these middle schoolers, it was their first time spending the night away from home. And… Read more »
It was already warm at 7:30am when the group started to trickle into the parking lot of Casa de la Esperanza for our adventure. Sleepiness mixed with excitement as we piled into the van for the four hour trip. Skyscrapers and billboards gave way to mountains and desert sage until we finally reached our destination:… Read more »
