The TRENDS podcast is a collaboration between the Community Foundation of Boulder County and KGNU. It dives deep into the community’s most pressing issues and explores the changes happening throughout Boulder County through the experiences of community members, especially those often rendered invisible by commercial media, to shed light on community challenges, solutions, and pathways forward for the county and the country.

Listen to the Diversity, Inclusion & Equity TRENDS podcast episode below:

Boulder County has a reputation of being a leader in progressive values, but not everyone feels welcome here.

A survey conducted by the Community Foundation of Boulder County shows that residents here feel we are least open to minorities, immigrants and refugees compared to other groups.  And very often, members of those groups feel very unwelcome.

In March 2019 Zayd Atkinson, an African American yoga student at Boulder’s Naropa University was confronted by several police officers, some with weapons drawn, while he was picking up trash in his front yard. Atkinson said that he wasn’t totally shocked that he’d been initially confronted by the police, but he was shocked and how much the situation escalated.

“I’ve been here since the beginning of fall, but I was familiar with the area, so I wasn’t surprised, I was surprised when he pulled out his gun,” said Atkinson.

The gun was pulled by a Boulder police officer who stopped his vehicle to question Atkinson, who was using a trash grabber to pick up garbage from his lawn near Folsom and Arapahoe. He said he feared for his life.

“There was a moment, especially when he pulled out the pistol,” said Atkinson. “I thought he was going to shoot me, I wasn’t expecting that. I had my headphones in and he came out of my blindside, and then I realized he was an officer of the law and I wanted to respect that, but he wanted to detain me and that’s when I walked away and continued doing what I was doing and things escalated.”

The incident prompted a huge community response with rallies in support of Atkinson. Boulder City Council convened community conversations on racism. A task force was created to explore forming a community police oversight board. The incident prompted the community to reflect on what it means to promote values of diversity while having many people of color reporting feeling unwelcome.

Ramon Gabrieloff-Parish, who teaches in the Environmental Studies program at CU remembers vividly what happened to Zayd Atkinson.

“if you’ve watched that tape at the bare minimum, the police escalated that situation beyond what it needed to be escalated, you know, like beyond what it was needed. And they created a situation that’s almost, it was almost deadly watching it.”

Gabrieloff-Parish also teaches the Diversity Seminar, part of the core curriculum at Naropa.

“We were studying racial profiling and policing. And I was like, ‘well folks,  if you didn’t know why we were studying this, I think, you know now. Like how much harder can the lesson come than having one of our students?”

Gabriellof Parish says that we as a society need to confront racism head on.

“If we can look race in the eye, I think that we can look gender in the eye. I think we can look sexuality in the eye. I think we can look class in the eye, but if we can’t look race in the eye… we’re not really going to be able to hold the gaze and really figure out what is up and how to undo and transform the other ones.”

Kayik Wildcat grew up in Arizona and now lives in Boulder. He is a senior at Fairview Highschool and is with AIYLI, the American IndianYouth Leadership Institute. Kayik says that is always aware of the lack of diversity living in Boulder County.

“… high school is probably 90% white,