Stories from the St Vrain 2023

Stories from the St Vrain is a Longmont-based art, science, and community health project celebrating the human and environmental stories of St Vrain Creek. Through innovative performances, art, science, and education, the project strengthens the connection between citizens and water while addressing important related topics of water scarcity, protection, stewardship, cultural relationships, and community action needed to address the health and safety of our water and our people.

May: Community Launch Party & Fundraiser

June: Global Water Dances

Global Water Dances: Stories from the St Vrain was a free, family-friendly, outdoor event featuring over 25 artists, including local youth and regional professional artists, offering prayer and performance at Golden Ponds Nature Area in Longmont, CO. They brought ritual, original works, and personal expression across a wide variety of cultural forms to celebrate one of Longmont's primary local water sources. Learn more about project artists, collaborators, and sponsors here. This event was part of the international initiative, Global Water Dances, that invites artists across the globe to dance for water. It was the10th year of Global Water Dances in Boulder County and attracted over 100 people across multiple generations and cultural backgrounds.

September: Fire Flood Friendship

Flood, Fire, Friendship was a free, outdoor, family-friendly event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the devastating 2013 flood along the Front Range. Dance, music, and poetry artists performed on the river's edge at Dickens Farm Nature Area in Longmont, CO, offering original works and personal expression on the cycles of a river, of life and death, of personal growth and nature connection. A community conversation with water leaders immediately followed the event. We concluded the day with a creek clean up.

September 8:
Guided Water Tour with david Harrison & Maren Waldman

September 9:
Performances in dance, music, poetry
Community Conversation with Water Leaders
Creek Clean Up

about our Larger project
Stories from the St Vrain 2023

Stories from the St Vrain is a Longmont-based art, science, and community health project celebrating the human and environmental stories of St Vrain Creek. Through innovative performances, art, science, and education, the project strengthens the connection between citizens and water while addressing important related topics of water scarcity, protection, stewardship, cultural relationships, and community action needed to address the health and safety of our water and our people.

Land & Culture Acknowledgement
The lands and rivers that this project seeks to celebrate are part of the ancestral lands of the Arapaho Cheyenne, Ute, and many other Indigenous Nations. We would like to learn, recognize, and honor the names, languages, and customs that were active here before colonialism and massacres. We seek and openly invite relationships that can assist this project in continuing in right relationship.

Related Commemoration
& Water Celebration Events in Boulder County

September 14, 7-9pm
Motus Playback Improv Theatre: “Stories from the Flood” reserve tix (free) & flood Photo exhibit @ Longmont Museum

September 23 & 24
Harvest of All First Nations 2nd Annual Corn Festival

September 30
10 Years After: Looking Back at the 2013 Flood
Walk/Hike at Pella Crossing organized by Boulder County Parks and Open Space

Sept. 1 – Dec. 10
2013 Flood – 10 Years Later
Exhibit at Boulder Public Library including audio and visual media of reflections and stories of community resilience, ten years after the Front Range flood of 2013.

More on the Project:

Project Guiding Questions

What role does the St Vrain Creek play in our community’s health, wellbeing, and ability to thrive?
What does the St Vrain Creek want us to know?
How can we come together, with sustained energy, to take care of our waters?

Purpose

To strengthen the connection between the St Vrain Creek and Longmont community, through innovative art, science, and education partnerships focused on addressing water related issues such as scarcity, adaptation and resilience, and to provoke community action. 

Mission & Vision

This project is a celebration and honoring of the St Vrain Creek, specifically as it flows through Longmont. It is founded on committed principles of inclusion and integrity, with the goal of cultivating respectful relationships and resilience in our community and watershed. A vast cross section of water experts, community leaders, municipal staff, cultural institutions and artists are invited to collaboratively design a series of events that bring people together around the Creek, at given nature sites along the Creek, and inside for reflection and conversation. These events will leverage the partners’ shared goals for the Creek and community resilience. Core collaborators will curate a series of intergenerational, multicultural, multilingual experiences that inspire, educate, and connect the community around the centrality of the St Vrain Creek to Longmont’s resilience. By bringing people together across expertise, age, cultures, and through bringing them outside to Nature, this project tends to the soul work of remembering Nature’s role in our lives individually and collectively; and the social work of learning what we need to do, alone and together, to take care of the wild places….so they, in return, take care of us.

Sponsors - Financial & Inkind

Trout ($250-$499)

Butterfly ($500-$999)

• University of Colorado Department for Outreach & Engagement

• Culinary Jules Personal Chef & Catering

• Longmont Community Foundation

• Una Vida Meditation and Movement

Turtle ($1000-$1499)

• Global Water Dances Initiative: Site Impact Fund Grant Recipient

Beaver ($1500-$1999)

• St Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District
  

Heron ($2000-$2499)

Osprey ($2500-$4999)

Eagle ($5000+)

Thank You to Additional Support & Expertise From:

Boulder County Arts Alliance, Fiscal Sponsor
St Vrain & Left Hand Watershed Conservancy District, Water Education