Serving the community since 1926
WEEK OF MARCH 6, 2025
VOLUME 98 | ISSUE 14
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Auraria Campus safety center to open in 2027 BY LONDON LYLE SPECIAL TO COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA
Community members get to work planting a neighborhood food forest.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF DUG
Food forests bring fresh produce to neighborhoods Denver Urban Gardens has 24 edible gardens throughout the metro area BY MERYL PHAIR SPECIAL TO COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA
Throughout the Denver metro area, edible gardens are popping up in unused lots. These gardens have trees planted in 8-foot-wide sunken basins filled with mulch with divots acting as sponges to gather rainwater and retain moisture. Small berry bushes and nut shrubs are planted near the trees with bigger bushes filling out the areas between the basins. The growing network of green oases is part of Denver Urban Gardens (DUG)’s Etkin Family Foundation Food Forest Program, an initiative that has expanded to 24 planting sites. This harvest season, the neighborhood for-
ests will supply the immediate community with an assortment of fresh produce, such as apples, cherries, peaches, gooseberries, hazelnuts and pears. Niki Barouxis, DUG’s food forest manager, said the initiative came out of the need for more public access green spaces across the city. Unlike DUG’s community garden program that focuses on individual garden plots and annual plantings, the food forests are gardens of perennials, those that stay alive year round and grow year to year. “Our food forest program is designed to be stewarded by community members and grown by and for the public,” Barouxis said. The food forests provide fruit trees, nut shrubs and berry
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bushes for anyone who wants to stop by for fresh produce. Each of the gardens across the metro area has signage that indicates what is in each garden and when produce should be harvested. Having started in 2022, the sites are still young and this summer will be the first year to bear fruit for the public, Barouxis said. “Right now, the sites are being babied and getting ready for public harvest,” Barouxis said. “We do have some existing sites where we added more perennials to make it into a food forest such as Barnum Community Orchard, which had mature fruit trees already there.” By increasing green space throughout the city, the growing canopy has important en-
vironmental benefits such as keeping neighborhoods cool by providing shade that lessens the “urban heat island effect” and activating unused plots of land. Through diverse plantings that mimic a forest, the sites also increase biodiversity and provide habitat for wildlife. Barouxis said DUG looks for several factors that indicate an ideal food forest site such as a slope on which fruit trees do particularly well and access to water. They typically look for sites near existing DUG gardens while schools and churches are good community partners for land use. One of the food forests was even planted on top of a landfill. SEE FOOD FORESTS, P4
Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) is planning to construct a new 33,000-squarefoot, three-story safety center to improve security on campus and create additional student spaces, which is expected to be completed by 2027. The state will fund the multimillion-dollar project with no student fees. The building is planned to host a new police facility and a number of public spaces, including classrooms and an event center designed to hold 100 people. Kwon Atlas, a consultant on the project and the director of economic development for the Montbello Organizing Committee, said the group envisioning the project prioritized community engagement in the design process for the new facility. “Our work really starts with hearing from the community,” Atlas said during a recent press conference about the building plans. The planning process first began in 2021 with a campus-wide survey that received more than 1,000 responses. Those engagement efforts resulted in many of the recommendations the group started out with, said Carl Meese, deputy chief of planning and sustainability at AHEC. Some of the public-facing components that AHEC is exploring right now include a student lounge that may be accessible 24/7, study areas and class labs. SEE SAFETY CENTER, P8
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