Welcome to Community Conversations! A series of conversations Mesa County Libraries staff has with passionate and informed community members. On our first ever Community Conversations episode, Bethany and Emmi sat down with the Tremaine Jackson, Head Football Coach at Colorado Mesa University. Hired in late 2019, Coach Jackson has navigated a wide variety of changes not only related to how he adapted running practice of a team of 100+ players due to COVID-19, but on a community level opening up a dialogue of being uncomfortable, participating in peaceful protests, and raising the acknowledgement of racism in the Grand Valley. Settle in for a conversation about race relations and bias and how we as a community can use our resources to learn, discover, create, and connect with everyone around us. Thank you Coach Jackson for an educational, kind, and much needed conversation!

For more information about resources mentioned in this episode, visit mesacountylibraries.org. Find the Mesa County Oral History Project on our website at https://mesacountylibraries.org/mcohp/, and be sure to stop in our Central Regional History Room to review "Hooded Empire: the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado" by Robert Goldberg, to learn important and relevant history about the roots of racism in Colorado. For more books about Race in America, visit https://mesa.marmot.org/.