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If you're local to Boulder County or Colorado, consider reaching out to these organizations working at the intersection of local and global challenges for partnership, field trips, and involving their work in your curricula.
Our school frequently partners with Harvest of Hope food pantry in Boulder. Students have engaged through talks on food insecurity, led class-run food drives, and volunteered with pantry operations. These collaborations bring real-world learning into themes like equity, civic action, and community care—making invisible needs visible and meaningful for students.
EFAA is another great organization working to ensure our community has access to food, housing, and other resources.
They have engaged with our students through a pantry tour and a Q&A session to help students explore the root causes of poverty and inequality. They also welcome student action through donation drives.
Boulder Jewish Community Center's (JCC) Milk and Honey Farm offers local students and community groups field trips and service‑learning experiences. Visits can include farm tours, sensory-based exploration, and hands‑on activities like goat milking, composting, seed planting, or pickling—ideal for embedding environmental sustainability, science inquiry, and civic responsibility into place‑based learning units.
The JCC also offers a ton of after school and community programming!
The Islamic Center of Boulder is a long-established, inclusive spiritual and community center in Boulder. It offers guided visits for schools, opportunities to participate in interfaith events, and involvement in community service projects. These engagements support curriculum in religious literacy, cultural awareness, civic responsibility, and interfaith collaboration.
They request contacting them with at least two days advance notice to set up a visit with a qualified guide.
I learned about this organization through a summer PD workshop with the Center for Asian Studies at CU Boulder. Contact them to bring firsthand refugee stories into your class! Refugees from diverse backgrounds are available virtually or in person to share their personal journeys—from home countries, through displacement, to life in the U.S.—inviting students to interact directly and ask questions.
This program supports curriculum goals in global citizenship, anti-bias education, and narrative inquiry. Their website also offers book and movie recommendations, and "Refugee 101" video resources.
Refugees + Immigrants United (RIU) Colorado is another organization that brings refugee- and immigrant voices into classroom learning. Speakers share personal migration stories, prompting student questions and reflection. These sessions support curriculum on migration, identity, and equity, enriching literature, social studies, SEL, and global learning units.
Rocky Mountain Equality offers Training & Education for educators seeking to bring LGBTQ+ voices and inclusive practice into schools.
Their Speaking Out panels bring trusted individuals from the LGBTQ+ community into classrooms to share lived experiences and invite student dialogue.
These panels mostly occur in middle and high schools.
The Museum of Boulder’s Teacher Resources include a range of downloadable curricula, coloring pages, and local history lesson materials—to support place-based learning and community stories.
Students can engage with Indigenous-authored/curated histories and the curriculum developed for "Proclaiming Colorado's Black History."
The materials are well-suited for integrating local heritage into social studies, art, SEL, and narrative projects, whether in-person or virtually.
This one's on my to-do list! Colorado Public Radio offers opportunities for student visits to CPR (25 people max) to learn more about what it takes to be a reporter and what goes into "making radio."
This would be a great fit for media literacy and journalism coursework.
Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) offers nature and local history-based programs for K-12 students throughout the year. Programming for middle and high school students can include Prairie Dogs and Ecosystem Health, Geology, Forest Ecosystems, Wetland Ecology, Land Management and Local History (see their website for elementary school-specific offerings).
We have also worked with OSMP to set up trail stewardship projects for our middle school students. Begin by filling out a program request form, linked here.
CPW offers a lot for educators, from teacher workshops to wildlife curriculum and field trips.
We used many of their resources during a middle school course on wildlife-human conflict. Their website offers classroom resources organized by grade level.
We have also collaborated with regional staff, including wildlife officers and park interpreters, to enhance student learning about Colorado's ecosystems, conservation, and human impact.
Contact information is available on the page linked above.
When we taught a course on human-wildlife conflict, we worked with Northern Colorado Wildlife Center to bring in a classroom speaker.
His presentation was interactive and engaging for middle schoolers and gave us a great foundation for understanding human-animal relationships.
They also have group volunteering opportunities!
While the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History is currently closed until January 8, 2026, they offer a variety of hands-on, guided programs for school groups. You can also visit for a self-guided tour - just contact the museum ahead of time to let them know your plans.
We have worked with the museum to set up talks with experts and object-based programming related to wild horses in the West and Indigenous histories. Resources and contact information are available through their website.
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is located in the southwest of the state, in Cortez. We love bringing students here to learn more about archaeology and Indigenous cultures and histories. Their core programming also engages students in the scientific process and gets them considering the complex interactions between people and their environments.
If you aren't able to make the trip, their website still offers online materials that you can use in your classroom. Teachers might also be interested in their free webinar series on Thursdays at 4pm MST, which highlights speakers/researchers working on a diverse range of topics!
East Window is an independent arts organization in North Boulder that supports and promotes diverse artistic practices and ideas. They are focused on bringing visibility to historically marginalized and underrecognized artists and communities.
We have brought students working on capstone projects here to speak with the director about following your passions and building something from the ground up.
I recommend reaching out to them (contact form available on their website) to discuss how current exhibitions might align with your class content and/or to set up a class visit.
CSU SPUR, located in Denver, has free admission and is open to the public! There's lots to see - veterinary surgeries, equine-assisted therapy, and even cooking activities in the SPUR kitchen.
This is a great place to visit for an interdisciplinary field trip. Self-guided tours for up to 20 students can happen anytime during SPUR's open hours. If you want something more tailored, you can contact them to set up a guided experience.
My science colleague and I partnered extensively with CU Boulder's Center for Healthy Mind and Mood during our happiness survey project (see more under the Global Unit Plan).
Their mission is "to promote healthy mood and emotional resilience in young people through inclusive transdisciplinary science."
Through working with them, our students were able to gain experience in conducting primary research. If you are interested in co-creating a research program related to well-being that puts your students in the driver's seat, they are an excellent organization to reach out to!
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