Boulder County spearheading online application for health, food, financial assistance
Jun 20th
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Department of Housing and Human Services is leading the Colorado PEAK Outreach Initiative, a statewide effort to ensure the success of a new online benefits application.
The application, www.Colorado.gov/PEAK, launched in early June to help facilitate access to public medical, food and cash assistance programs for eligible children, adults and families across Colorado.
Boulder County is leading the initiative’s statewide implementation through unprecedented collaboration with state agencies, community-based organizations and leadership in each of Colorado’s 64 counties.
“The initiative aims to ensure that every eligible individual, child and family in Colorado is screened for and enrolled in the health, food and financial self-sufficiency benefits that help them thrive,” project director Dawn Joyce said.
Colorado has joined with 26 other states across the U.S. that offer online benefit applications as a targeted effort to meet the increasing demand for public assistance benefits and to remove barriers preventing people from receiving assistance.
“After talking with several other states with online applications like Colorado PEAK, we learned that a targeted, effective outreach effort was critical to the success of web-based benefit application,” said Housing and Human Services Director Frank Alexander.
Boulder County secured numerous foundation grants to fund the three-person PEAK Outreach Initiative team, which has built coalitions across the state, developed outreach and training materials, and conducted focus groups with more than 200 individuals to ensure that the PEAK online application is user-friendly in both English and Spanish.
Organizations in Boulder County currently offering assistance with PEAK are: Emergency Family Assistance Association, Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, the Mental Health Center of Boulder and Broomfield Counties, Sister Carmen Community Center, Our Center, The Parenting Place, Community Food Share, Project Hope, Longmont Senior Services and City of Longmont Aging Services.
For more information about PEAK and training opportunities, please Jacqueline Sullivan at 303-918-5427 or PEAKOutreach@bouldercounty.org.
-Bo
AMERICA’S DEADLIEST WAR ALSO IS MOST MEMORIALIZED, CU-BOULDER PROFESSOR SAYS
Jun 20th
As the nation recognizes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s start, public interest has been rekindled in the war and the numerous memorials and monuments marking historic figures, sites and battlegrounds in states around the country.
South Carolina militiamen fired the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and over the next four years more than 10,000 military engagements between the North and South took place. In the end more than 600,000 soldiers died.
“The Civil War was our most destructive war, it claimed the most lives, and it was on our territory,” said Professor Kenneth Foote of the University of Colorado Boulder’s geography department. “And when it comes to memorials and monuments, the Civil War is by far our most memorialized of the nation’s wars.”
In general, public memorials are created to act as a reminder of a tragic event or because an event has an important moral or ethical lesson that needs to be preserved, says Foote.
“I think there is a lesson from Civil War memorials that carries through to the present day because the Civil War was this very divisive event in the 19th century over slavery — and the destruction caused by it — though later some battlefields also became points of reconciliation,” Foote said.
And in the case of the Civil War, many people in America still feel a personal connection to the war.
“When it comes to the Civil War, even today probably a majority of Americans had some family member involved, and so there is still, even after these many generations, a pretty direct family connection for many people,” Foote said. “The other major factor is that it involved the issue of slavery in the United States.”
Gettysburg is one of the most visited and recognized Civil War sites. It also is one of the most decorated battlefields in the world, according to Foote. Virtually every corps, army, division, brigade, regiment, company and battery that served at Gettysburg has erected a memorial, he said.
“Almost all of the major Civil War battlefields are marked very extensively and some of them have become more important — like Gettysburg or Vicksburg — because they mark critical turning points in the war,” Foote said.
Civil War monument and memorial styles have changed over the years, Foote says, and are very much a function of the time when they were built. For example, the Civil War statue located in front of the Boulder County Courthouse on Pearl Street was created at the end of its era, Foote says.
“This would be very similar to the ones that were put up in the 1860s and 1870s,” he said. “When this went up in about 1914, the style of representation was beginning to fade away to more abstract public art.”
When it comes to the North and the South honoring their dead, Foote said the styles of the memorials changed over time as the war’s wounds healed.
“Initially, many of the memorials started off as very partisan, so Northern memorials celebrated the heroics of Northern forces, while it was common in the South to see memorials that were built as a protest,” Foote said. “One of the most common statues in the South was of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a general, but also was the founder of the Klu Klux Klan.”
Overall, Foote says the Civil War will always represent an important point in the history of our nation, and the memorials are part of that history.
“There were still some great divides that aren’t possible to ignore, but people gradually came together over the meaning and it was worked out oftentimes with these memorials and monuments,” Foote said.
Foote became interested in studying memorial sites during a 1980s visit to Salem, Mass. While there, he was surprised to find at that time no memorial site or markers associated with the Salem witch trials, a significant chapter in early U.S. colonial history and in Salem’s history. He has visited hundreds of sites that have been scarred by war battles or other incidents of violence or tragedy in the United States and abroad, and is the author of the book “Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy.”
To view a video featuring Foote talking about Civil War memorials visit http://www.colorado.edu/news and click on the story headline.
Forestry project at Heil Valley Ranch begins Monday
Jun 17th
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Parks and Open Space Department has hired a local contractor to mechanically treat approximately 150 acres of ponderosa pine forest in Heil Valley Ranch beginning on Monday, June 20.
The thinning project will conclude in September. Park visitors will likely hear the operations along the Ponderosa Loop Trail during the next three months and are strongly advised to stay on-trail for personal safety and that of the equipment operators.
“Like so many ponderosa pine forests, this area is unnaturally dense due to years of fire suppression,” Parks and Open Space Outreach Coordinator Pascale Fried said. “This project will create a mosaic of openings and uneven-aged groupings of trees. The goal is to have a healthier forest that is less susceptible to insects, disease and catastrophic wildfires.”
The treatment utilizes a harvester that fells, delimbs and bucks trees into standard log lengths, and a forwarder to haul wood material away from the site. The logs will be used in biomass plants that heat the county Parks and Open Space and Sheriff’s Office buildings.
Smaller wood material, including branches and small trees, will initially be used as a road base for equipment to prevent erosion, then piled and burned in the next few years as conditions permit.
For additional information, contact Forest Specialist Nick Stremel at 303-678-6290 or nstremel@bouldercounty.org.
