Building livable communities, one place at a time

 “Some of these towns have tried to create a place that has character, but when you take out the characters, it just feels plastic.”

— Clark Anderson,  Community Builders

Anderson and his team advocate for healthy, equitable, resilient and sustainable communities through studied interventions and carefully tailored trainings. The team attracted national media attention in 2023 when The New York Times described how Community Builders helped to broker a community rift in Silverton, Colorado, where bitter political contention had resulted in death threats to the town’s mayor.

The Silverton kerfuffle was instigated when the mayor refused to allow the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at Town Council meetings, a final straw that broke the community’s already frayed equilibrium. Only through diplomatic reaffirmation of community cohesion did Silverton mend bitter antipathies and protracted contention that were leading to potential violence.

Community Builders and, specifically, Anderson were acknowledged as the healing balm that brought combative citizens together through orchestrated civil dialogue. Anderson, who led the effort, was already working in Silverton to help draft a 10-year master plan for the town, so the timing was right for an intervention.

In the heat of the controversy, Anderson convened small groups in what became known as The Compass Project. “Community Builders would bring residents together, away from microphones and public spaces, to see if they could find a common vision for Silverton’s future,” the Times reported.

They did, resulting in a strategy that established a shared sense of place by acknowledging among its citizens a common love for Silverton. Anderson and team first had to build the trust required to foment this all-important sense of mutuality. They did so through open dialogue, often among embittered foes.

“It turned out that newcomers and old-timers, millennials and baby boomers pretty much wanted the same thing for Silverton,” reported the Times. A focus on shared values ameliorated hostile perceptions as the town took the first step in community healing.

Anderson has also brokered community divisions in Crested Butte, where growth was the issue, and in Taos, New Mexico, where the community was fractured by racially driven social divisions.

“We look for projects in communities that can demonstrate need,” Anderson said. “We bring ideas, information and expertise. But rather than being a hired external expert, we understand that the fundamental knowledge you need is in the community where there is an understanding of needs and values. We’re not hired to find the answers. We come in and say, ‘We will help you find the answers,’ and in that process, you help build community. By virtue of taking ownership and responsibility, there is a stronger feeling of purpose.”

The evolution of community

Why does community matter? Why does loss of community cause deep lament for those who have lived and loved it — as evidenced by the discourse around the loss of soul that surfaces regularly in Aspen today?

“At the most basic level, community is relationships,” Anderson said. “As an ecologist, part of my thinking comes from science and nature. We humans evolved to benefit from social interaction and cooperation in which we evolved certain behaviors and characteristics that made it easier for us to bond and have cohesion, which is something that’s very deeply ingrained in our being because it is part of how we’re hardwired.

”Unfortunately, we also inherited very real dispositions toward competition amongst each other for resources, which turns into tribalism. And we know that these are aspects that come from the primate lineage. Our closer primate lineage is more aligned for competition and tribalism, and there’s another lineage that’s more oriented toward caregiving. It’s all part of us.”

Anderson said primate influences are conflicted by the same dualism that separates humans from much of the animal kingdom. “We can be animals that want to belong, that want to be connected and that fundamentally need to be part of something larger than ourselves to survive,” he said. “We can inherently be interested in our own needs and self-interest. But we can also struggle to see shared values in people who are different than us. That’s part of what we have to deal with in the human mindset.”

This incongruity between self and others can divide communities and muddy the value of communal relations upon which societies are built. “When you look at what we’ve done as a species, the most magical thing is that we have come together in certain places to create cultural and physical reflections of who we are, not as individuals but as a group with shared ideas, principles and values,” he said.

Communities, he said, are a physical manifestation of times and places where “people come and settle together and together reflect a physical and economic manifestation of a place. Progress, innovation and technology took place in the cities thousands of years ago where people were there to exchange ideas, information and technology. Communities are our highest form of manifesting what’s best about us: art, music, culture, architecture and belonging.”

Collective aspirations, said Anderson, “are the most important things we humans have created — and not all of those are pretty. There are times in history when some of those shared values are quite ugly, but there’s a lot of beauty, too.”

Most historic changes have occurred slowly in what Anderson calls “incrementalism,” which allowed social traits to establish gradually, in ways that worked empirically. As technology and capitalism increased the speed of change, such as the suburban model that put masses of people into clustered homes, the rate of change thwarted assimilation to new lifestyles and emergent values.

“It was very different from what had been,” Anderson said of suburbia. “People became separated by economic status and that became written in code — bigger and smaller houses, expensive and less expensive. So, communities began to look different. There are now a lot more pressures on community and people are scared by what’s happening to their communities. That has to do with the isolation that comes from our economic widening gap and the isolation we get from technology.”

The struggle for community is confounded by dissociation from those around us. “Community,” in Anderson’s definition, “is when we’re connected and are the best versions of ourselves, which means looking out for each other and doing things that are altruistic. Reciprocation is an amazingly powerful thing.”

Motivated by change

Anderson, 47, grew up in East Vail when “Vail was still a town.” His parents met in Vail, where his father, a Vietnam War veteran, was advised to seek peace for himself. “My father died at 42, in 1984. At the time, he was serving on the Vail Town Council. I was 7, and that had a huge effect on my life. What I learned later is that the things he was working for on council were the things I would later adopt as my own interests today: housing, water, and how you sustain community and quality of life while going through change.”

A strong ethic in land conservation inspired studies in ecology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where Anderson met a man who would become his mentor. Will Toor, a former mayor of Boulder, today serves as executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, which is an arm of the state government. 

“Toor was on City Council in Boulder,” Anderson said, “and he talked about this idea of infill. I told him that sounded like development, but he said, ‘No, we need to figure out how not to sprawl.’” Toor introduced Anderson to community planning at a new level and set him on a long career path that would lead him to found Community Builders years later.

By the 1990s, Anderson had returned to Eagle/Vail, where he aligned with childhood friend Peter Hart, who later became a wilderness advocate attorney with Wilderness Workshop in the Roaring Fork Valley. Another associate was Arn Menconi, who was then an Eagle County commissioner. A fourth team member, Adam Palmer, died in an avalanche near Silverton in 2021.

These friends started a community leadership forum — “Shaping the Future of the Eagle Valley” — in which Anderson played a role coordinating a group of 25 leaders in the Eagle Valley asking: How do we grow and handle transportation and the economy?

“This was in the ’90s,” said Anderson, “and a lot of those questions were not fully formed, and there were various futures that the Vail Valley could have taken. It was an intriguing conversation. We applied what we learned to the Eagle County Comprehensive Plan update.”

Research led Anderson to comprehensive plans for other communities, including Basalt and Aspen, which added “smart growth” to his vernacular. This is defined as mixed land uses; compact building design; a range of housing opportunities and choices; walkable neighborhoods; distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place; and the preservation of open space, farmland, natural beauty and critical environmental areas. This led him to graduate school at the University of California, Davis, where his wife was earning a doctorate in ecology.

“I spent a lot of time studying community engagement and decision-making and how to enable effective collaboration at the local level — to understand and decide around difficult issues,” Anderson said.

He was hired by the Sonoran Institute, which pioneered what would become smart growth principles. Though running its water program with a conservationist goal, Anderson realized that, in the conservation world, the big missing puzzle piece was community planning.

“Conservation had been a defense, where you lock up land and water,” Anderson said. “But we needed an offense, which is to carry the ball of growth and change. We can’t just sit back and say, ‘I’m good,’ and watch from our comfortable places as the rest of the world suffers. Growth and change are not only happening now; they will always happen. As an ecologist at heart, I understand that as a fact of life.”

Resistance to change often stands in the way of forming a practical collective vision for the future. The challenge of acknowledging change as it occurs induces struggles within communities. 

“We’re trying to work toward a static idea that’s often in the rearview,” said Anderson. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say no to things or be clear about our priorities and principles, but it does mean that we’re too often fighting the wrong battles. That means we’re making a lot less progress on the things that matter because a lot of the dialogue happens in this nonreality that’s absent change.”

Anderson said that building roadblocks to change merely displaces change elsewhere. His example of the Grand Avenue Bridge in Glenwood Springs speaks to pushing change farther downvalley and creating impacts there.

“The Roaring Fork Valley has had a massive effect on shaping the Colorado River Valley,” Anderson said. “That happens where we don’t understand the consequence of our decisions because we don’t deal with the real facts on the ground.”

Visionary community planning

Anderson opened the Colorado office of the Sonoran Institute and found that his community planning background fit with Sonoran’s model for conservation. He came to realize the mistake of separating a conservation ethic from community planning.

“I wasn’t working in Aspen or Vail,” said Anderson. “I was working in Rifle and Delta because that’s where the pressures were and a lot of the need was. But you come into the room there as a conservation guy, and you don’t get any respect.”

Anderson recognized the limitations of saying no to growth, so he formed Community Builders in 2016 to provide the alternative of “a very positive, forward-looking community and economic development organization that allowed us to take on a broader suite of issues.” 

Community Builders has opened doors to communities in transition away from phased-out coal-based economies. “We worked to help communities going through transition away from coal to think about and develop economic strategies for how they are going to do that,” he said. “It’s called ‘just transition work.’ Not everything had to come back to: Did we protect the land and the water? Other outcomes were equally important.”

With a staff of nine, Community Builders has drawn funding from earned income, as well as grants from the Economic Development Administration in Washington, D.C., by working in energy-driven northwestern Colorado and with Native American communities in Arizona and southwest Colorado. Anderson raises philanthropic funds to seed new initiatives and cover the cost of projects such as Silverton, where Community Builders was the largest investor and which made the project feasible.

A community intervention begins with basic questions, said Anderson: “What is it you really want to see in the future here? What is your hope for your town? What are you afraid of? In the responses, you begin to find information that can help the community by building a better understanding of what isn’t working and what the possibilities are. And once you’ve got that, you start to get a vision. From that vision, we can bring in some expertise, like examples of what other communities are doing, and create a learning environment where community members come in and talk with us about what has worked in other places and how they’ve navigated some of the trade-offs. We help them build toward crafting solutions that are going to work there.

“That takes a hell of a lot of time building trust and getting through tough discussions, but by the time you go through that, people are pretty bought in. They believe in the work because they’ve had a chance to talk and had a chance to drive some of it. They’re helping guide the ship.”

Woebegone times

Laments for the irretrievable past are compelling, said Anderson, who understands place-based emotions from the pangs of loss he felt for the Vail of his childhood.

“There are good things that can come in its place, with challenges and opportunities,” he said. “Most mountain towns have faced essentially the same set of dynamics. They are such intriguing places to live that they attract a lot of people, and they have service economies. As it gets harder and harder for people to make it, the core of the community can’t be there anymore. The choice is often preference for physical characteristics over the characters that make up our communities.

“I like to think of community character as two things: the physical look and feel of a place and the more fundamental thing, the characters that give that place its character. Some of these towns have tried to create a place that has character, but when you take the characters out, it just feels plastic. For us to be able to keep the characters, we are going to radically have to rethink what this place will look like in 30 years, but we’re committed enough to the people and to the idea of community that we’re going to design this to make it happen.”

Anderson cited places that have preserved community character in Europe and Latin America, places that have great charm as small communities and have realistically figured out how to accommodate a lot of people. Anderson then zeros in on the Roaring Fork Valley with sobering clarity.

“So, growth is managed to look OK, and it’s going to be really expensive, which means certain people can be here, but at least we won’t change. We’ll be OK,” he said. “But the huge miss we made is that it’s not going to stay the same. If we don’t keep the characters, people are going to feel the same discontentment, and what’s worse is that we will have accidentally shared this challenging set of problems with our neighbors in a very predictable domino-cascading effect.

“The characteristics of communities get hollowed out because a lot of people who once lived there can’t afford to be there anymore. And it’s important to remember that community isn’t static and has to include an idea of the future.”

That future belongs to succeeding generations, yet Anderson acknowledged that his two school-age children will probably not be able to afford to live here as adults.

“The idea of feeling rooted in a place changes when there doesn’t seem to be a future for my kids and therefore there’s not a future for me,” he said. “We wring our hands wondering what happened to community, but we didn’t make space for them. When I look at this valley, my dream would be that we can rethink who really is part of our community with a much more expansive look.

“We look beyond what we have today and ask: What if we took a radical re-imagining of what this place would be like if we all worked together to create a valley or region that’s connected with neighborhoods with real people living in them that feel like they’re connected to this place, but also feel like they can move throughout this region that we’re all part of, and we’re not just cogs in a machine feeding a set of jobs that are supporting a pretty small part of the community?”

Bitterness over loss of community foments a lack of cohesion and civil dialogue, which tends to divide rather than unite, consigning the region to a lack of cooperation and a default to the pitfalls of isolation and economic disparity.

“Now, in Glenwood, we can’t even approve an eight-unit Habitat for Humanity project on city land that is being made out to be a unique meadow when, in reality, it is surrounded by roads. It’s one place where we can create homes for people who make this place work, and we can’t even do that. I would love to see these places remain exactly as they are, but I also want my kids to be able to live here.”

This is where Anderson the conservationist confronts Anderson the community builder.

“We are surrounded by the mountains,” he said, “and I’m a conservationist who believes we have to stop pretending that every inch of land matters. Let’s get serious about how we create real neighborhoods and do it in a systems-looking way that’s not just a housing project connected by the same type of auto-oriented transportation system we have. Let’s create a connective system of neighborhoods and locally serving jobs that makes this place whole. This is totally doable, but it takes political will. If we truly care about community, we need to radically rethink our fear of growth and embrace that we need to begin making space for our community.

“That community is here, and they deserve to be here just as much as we do, so let’s figure out how to build a community economy that works. That will take a massive political mind shift. Until we do that, all this feeling of losing people, of being stuck in traffic, it’s not going to go away.”

A practical, local application

In early March, Anderson and his team at Community Builders facilitated a three-day symposium at the Hotel Colorado titled Building Better Places that brought together representatives of five different governance organizations from across western Colorado to exchange ideas and share stories. Included were 10 civic and political leaders from towns collaborating under the umbrella of the Colorado River Valley Economic Development Partnership (CRVEDP), which covers New Castle, Silt, Rifle, Parachute and Battlement Mesa. Orchestrated by Community Builders, the symposium brought participants together to understand and address key challenges and opportunities facing their communities in order to find common ground on workable action plans.

Alicia Gresley, a Rifle City Council member who heads the CRVEDP, explained that her search for economic development consultation a year ago led to Anderson and Community Builders, which tailors programs and helps fund them. Gresley applied and the CRVEDP was accepted for the Building Better Places workshop, the tenets of which dovetailed with the partnership’s ambition to generate a sustainable regional economy with the tagline “better jobs closer to home.” The symposium also included a groups from Meeker, Montrose County, Silverton and Leadville/Lake County.

“Progress is hard,” Anderson said on the Community Builders website. “Breaking from the status quo relies on undoing decades of outdated and inequitable systems, policies and paradigms that guide the decisions and investments that shape our communities and economies.”

Timing is crucial, he said, and now is the right time to inspire Colorado River communities as they grapple to form a common vision from shared values that can move them forward.

“Once you have people willing to make the move, you’re ready,” said Anderson, who likened the process to an individual who wakes one day with the desire for more clarity in doing things in alignment with one’s values by examining routines and habits that one is willing to work on.

“We start with key trends, things like housing, a changing economy, political divisions,” Anderson said. “Then we move into planning and policy, building capacity and creating funding, engagement and support. We provide success stories they can learn from.”

The three-day March program convened a mix of private and public civic leaders who formed, stormed and normed in the interests of their individual communities, but with the goal of adopting regional unity.

“It was so great to get to know members of our organization in a different way and with new perspectives,” Gresley said. “It was a great learning environment as a listening and sounding board for our common ground, although we have different approaches.”

A large and growing client list has provided Community Builders with examples of communities across the West that are engaging in successful cooperation.

“We believe in the power of story,” Anderson said. “Throughout our work, we’ve seen how stories can drive meaningful change. From success stories to lessons learned, we use these insights to engage and inspire audiences through public speaking, media production and traditional and digital media outreach. From small towns to growing cities, we assist in grounding strong local partnerships and engaging the entire community in an effort to create healthy, equitable and prosperous places.”

Community Builders acknowledges that “too often, the decisions that impact an entire community are made by a handful of people. This is poor civic health. We believe every member of a community is capable of understanding issues and giving an impactful voice. Effective civic engagement meets people where they are, empowering them to take part in their community.”

Gresley has become a driving force for this outcome. “It was good to have an independent third party to facilitate and pull out our different points of view and lead us toward agreement on the fundamentals,” she said. “The training revealed that the energy and commitment is there. We all left with the same intention, that when we all put in these efforts, it benefits the whole region.”

Gresley pointed out that the outcomes of the symposium may one day influence the lives of thousands of citizens along the Colorado River, which has seen blistering population growth in the past two decades.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for economic development here,” said Gresley, “and we are taking the lessons from the Exxon pullout that wiped out Parachute in the 1980s not to put all our eggs in one basket but, rather, to diversify the region as a whole.”

Black Monday and the oil shale bust

A single-focus economy led to the economic disaster historically known as “Black Monday,” when on May 2, 1982, energy giant Exxon, then the largest energy company in the world, announced that it was pulling out of its Colony oil shale project based in Parachute and Battlement Mesa. Exxon’s notice came as a surprise to local and state government officials and instantly put more than 2,000 people out of work, plunging Garfield County and the surrounding region into a recession that had a lasting ripple effect on the economy of the entire state.

But nowhere was the impact as great as in western Garfield County, which had become overextended as a result of speculation based on the promise of an unprecedented energy boom. 

“When Exxon pulled the plug, Western Slope counties were left with huge debts for police and fire protection and new hospitals,” Andrew Gulliford, a professor at Fort Lewis College, wrote in High Country News in 2012.  “I watched my friends lose their jobs, their houses and, finally, their marriages. The president of the First National Bank in Grand Junction shot himself. The First National Bank in Rifle closed because so many people demanded their money. Desperate depositors lined the block.”

Gulliford, who in 1989 detailed the oil shale debacle in his book “Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale,” first written as a doctoral dissertation, was deeply moved by the cataclysm that paralyzed the region and sent shock waves across the West that reverberate in the region today. He wrote: “I couldn’t help but think of all the local lives shattered by Exxon’s corporate hubris, the decadelong economic depression shared by Grand Junction and Rifle, the bankruptcies, the foreclosures, the blighted lives, the lost hopes.”

Oil shale development in the 1980s, he wrote, “was about international energy markets and corporate machismo. But no longer will energy companies run roughshod over Western Slope residents. The demographics have changed. Newcomers now unite with farm and ranch families.”

With a valuable, if painful, lesson from history, residents of what Gulliford calls “The Next West” today speak up for environmentally responsible management of the area’s public lands: “Let’s wait for a proven technology that does not squander water, pollute the air and threaten wildlife and archaeological sites. The Old West was boom and bust. The Next West must embody environmentally and socially responsible development.”

The promise of “The Next West” is what Gresley, the CRVEDP and Community Builders are working toward with a new paradigm for healthy, sustainable, thriving and, ultimately, livable communities by fashioning a new economic culture for a region in transition.

This transition is spelled out in the town of Parachute’s municipal policy with clarity and purpose: “The Town Council values the oil and gas industry that fuels the local economy and also welcomed the marijuana industry when it was an emerging market. The Town Council now endeavors to further diversify the local economy and strives to create a strong and resilient tax base that can provide reliable services to the community throughout and despite economic downturns.

“The Town Council also wishes to create opportunities that reduce the necessity for our friends and families to endure daily ‘super commutes’ out of the community to higher-paying jobs elsewhere. The Town Council recognizes that this will require a high degree of flexibility and the ability to ‘think big,’ but it is fully embracing this challenge.”

In 2022, the Town Council issued this mission statement: “Make Parachute the best place to live, work and raise a family in western Colorado. This includes diversifying the local economy, beautifying the community and creating additional amenities for existing residents and businesses.”

Gulliford foresaw such ambitions in the aftermath of the Exxon disaster: “Again,” he wrote, “the Colorado River Valley is at the fulcrum of a national debate, but now the issues are environmental protection as well as energy development. Quality of life is important.”

The next installment of the “In Search of Community” series will focus on housing as the keystone issue determining the future of regional communities.