Even before the pandemic, president and CEO Dan Porterfield and Cristal Logan, the Institute’s vice president for Community Programs and Engagement, saw the opportunity to deploy the Institute’s resources and expertise as a force for good in the region from Aspen to Parachute. Aspen locals Bob Hurst, an Institute trustee, and Soledad Hurst saw that need too. The result: the new Hurst Community Initiative, directed by Evan Zislis, the Institute’s new director of community engagement. Dedicated to promoting dialogue and increasing understanding, the initiative collaborates with government officials, nonprofits, community organizers, the private sector, immigrants, and philanthropists. The initiative began work at a moment of new need: hard hit by Covid-19, Aspen and Snowmass endured the highest unemployment rates in Colorado and an already high suicide rate, with the area’s Latinx community bearing the heaviest burden. Initiative projects already underway include a Hurst Leadership Seminar, conducted with the Institute’s Executive Leadership Seminars Program; an Opportunity Youth Forum in collaboration with the Institute’s Forum for Community Solutions; regional BIPOC youth outreach designed to introduce and sustain meaningful experiences in the public lands of the White River National Forest, in collaboration with the Institute’s Energy and Environment Program; and a regional forum in collaboration with the Institute’s Community Strategies Group. Focused on recovery and resilience, the Hurst Community Initiative will connect these and the many other community-focused Institute programs with the Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valleys.
Hometown Heroes
Publications Section 4: Strengthening Practices to Improve Job Quality
Tools: Employee Ownership
View tools and resources related to employee ownership.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Centering Workers in Workforce Development
The Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance collaborates with employers and stakeholders to boost employment, earnings, and equity for local workers.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Lessons and Leadership To Foster Economic Justice for Illinois Workers
LEP trains workers to promote equity, enforce rights, build unions, develop leaders, ensure workplace safety, and advance economic justice.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Worker Owned and Worker Driven
While the rideshare apps have increased convenience, they’ve eroded job quality. See how the Drivers’ Cooperative is helping to end exploitative conditions.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Creating Employee-Owned Businesses That Provide Good Jobs and Succeed
Through employee ownership, The Industrial Commons is building a new Southern working class that erases the inequities of generational poverty.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Strengthening the Hidden Resilience Workforce
We see the effects of climate change, but we rarely see the people who help to rebuild — and they often lack safe conditions, decent pay, or benefits.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Advancing a Pro-Worker, Pro-Climate Agenda in Texas
The Texas Climate Jobs Project advances a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda — helping to solve the climate crisis while creating millions of good jobs.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing and Coalition Building for Structural Change
LAANE, led by Job Quality Fellow Roxana Tynan, is fighting to build an economy rooted in good jobs, thriving communities, and a healthy environment.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing Unemployed and Underemployed Workers
UWU, led by Job Quality Fellow Neidi Dominguez, engages unemployed/underemployed workers, a population that has not been mobilized at scale since the 1930s.
Longform
How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together
MIT Center for Constructive Communication Director Deb Roy explains how the caricatures Republicans and Democrats paint of each other diverge from reality, and the ways local newsrooms can leverage their “trust capital” and emerging technology to promote listening and understanding amid disagreement.