Whether it’s jazz, hip hop, or classical, music has the ability to lift a person’s mood. Seventeen year old Dominic Ellerbee, of Denver, Colorado, found that to be the truth when his family hit hard times.
Last year, Dominic was forced to live in a minivan with his mother, Madonna, and his little sister Dejaune. But Dominic had a creative outlet that enabled him to keep his spirits up: He’s a multi-instrumentalist and composer making a name for himself in the Mile High music community by playing and starring in the Denver Public Schools’ Citywide Honor Band.
Dominic, who plays the six-string bass guitar, acoustic and electric guitars, drums, the piano, the vibraphone and the recorder, also writes music for his school’s drum line and gives music lessons to other students. Of his difficult life, he told Alison Noon of the Denver Post, “It was hard sometimes, but it never really got to me because I had music and stuff.”
For months now, Dominic has moved from house to house, staying with friends and family members. But he expects his transitory life to become more settled now that his mother has found a job and they plan to move into an apartment this month. Meanwhile, he’s writing an original musical that, if completed, the school director at Denver South promised to stage next year.
Our guess is this young musical talent can finish anything he tries.
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Tag: Colorado
How Colorado Locals Are Banding Together to Save Their Beer
Coloradans love their beer — especially when it’s brewed in the state using crisp Rocky Mountain water and fresh local ingredients. So in 2010 when AC Golden Brewing Co., the craft arm of MillerCoors, put out a call for locals to help the company grow hops for its Colorado Native Lager, volunteers were quick to hop to it (pun intended) and plant themselves a garden. The way the program works is that AC Golden invests in the plants and mails them out to participants along with instructions on how to grow them. At the end of the season, the volunteers give whatever crop they yield back to the brewers to use in their beer. In the program’s first year, about 50 or 60 amateur gardeners got involved. Since then, the number of volunteers has ballooned year over year. Jeff Nickels, AC Golden’s head brewer, told Modern Farmer that in 2013, 750 volunteers signed up, yielding enough hops to brew 120 barrels — about 1 percent of the company’s yearly output. That may sound like small potatoes, but the Colorado Native Hops Grower program wasn’t exactly created to fulfill the company’s hops needs. It was built to promote the beer — which incidentally is the only lager brewed with 100 percent Colorado ingredients — while also showcasing a concerted effort to bring more hops crops to the state.
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While the interest for locally produced hops is there, high entry costs and lack of knowledge has kept Colorado gardeners from trying to compete with states like Washington, Oregon and Idaho. According to Ron Godin, a hops specialist from Colorado State University, farmers would need to invest about $20,000 per acre and about three years to get a hops farm going. That’s a lot of time to be waiting to brew. In the meantime, AC Golden has brought in experts to help farmers get their hops crops hopping. But it’s not easy. Some crops have been unsuccessful, as the potential for pests, mold and mildew is high. If a crop is harvested, AC Golden is paying a premium for it. Colorado hops are selling for about $15 per pound, about five times the USDA’s reported average price in 2012.
Volunteers in the Hop Grower program have faced some of the same challenges, of course on a smaller scale. Participant K.C. Dunstan remembers his first harvest — eight hours of picking the cones led not only to raw and irritated skin due to the plant’s thorny nature and three ounces of product. Still, the volunteers enjoy contributing, even in a small part, to the local beer scene. “It’s really impressive to me that people like our company well enough and like our beer well enough to help us out and grow for us,” Nickel says. “If helping us means they enjoy it more, we are doing our job.”
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Teaching Low-Income Youth These Skills May Just Solve the Tech Job Hiring Gap
Jeff Macco, co-founder of Denver mobile app startup AppIt Ventures, was trying to hire a junior developer in 2012—a process that ultimately took six weeks. Frustrated by this time-consuming search for an employee, Macco began to wonder if it was possible to train more people with the technology skills companies are seeking most today. In 2013, only 58.8% of the students in the Denver Public Schools graduated on time, within four years. So after Macco left AppIt Ventures last year, he started SeedPaths, aiming to train some of these students who hadn’t been able to follow the standard educational path because of obstacles in their personal lives for careers in technology.
SeedPaths classes are currently open to low-income students aged 16 to 21 who have experienced some barriers to their education, such as homelessness or learning disabilities. “We found a unique funding source in the federal government that was targeted toward this demographic of students,” Macco told Andy Vuong of the Denver Post. The $6000 tuition for the first 13 students was covered by money from the federal Workforce Investment Act. In addition to teaching them skills such as HTML and JavaScript, SeedPaths also provides support that low-income students might need to complete training, such as free lunch and bus passes, and works to set its graduates up with internships and job opportunities.
The first group of students includes Joel Azoulay, who was homeless during high school and ended up earning a GED, and 18-year-old Diego Conde, who has lived in five foster homes since his mother’s death from cancer in 2008. “What’s so great about the program is that they have not only taught me about the tech industry, but also the professionalism part of it, involving high energy and intellectual curiosity,” Conde told Vuong. “It’s just a variety of things that I had never learned or nobody ever taught me while being in the child welfare system.”
SeedPaths plans to expand its course offerings for students who don’t qualify for low-income federal support soon, helping more people find good jobs and solving the tech hiring problem at the same time.
Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive in School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen.
A Medical Emergency Landed This Physician on Food Stamps, Now She’s Fighting Hunger Stereotypes
Robin Dickinson was working as a physician in Denver while her husband looked after their two young children when she suffered two strokes. Unable to work because of the resulting dizziness and fatigue, Dickinson lived off savings while her husband took care of her and the kids. Their money dwindled to the point where they could only afford potatoes, oatmeal and rice. Then Dickinson realized her family qualified for food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“There’s a safety net there for a reason. It’s for people in our situation,” she told Mary Jo Brooks of the PBS News Hour. “It has nothing to do with your education. It has nothing to do with how good a person you are or how hard you work. It has everything to do with your financial situation. And our financial situation was really bad.” Dickinson’s kids cheered when they were able to purchase fruits and vegetables for the first time in weeks with the help of SNAP.
As she recovered, Dickinson became determined to change people’s perceptions about the sort of people who rely on SNAP. She joined Hunger Free Colorado‘s photography program. The non-profit gave cameras to people receiving food assistance, and mounted an exhibit of their photos called “Hunger Through My Lens” at the Colorado State Capitol. Now Dickinson has a goal of working her way off public assistance within a year, and has started her own family practice to serve the poor. She can only work a few hours at a time, but she told Brooks, “We have a five-year goal of building my own building in order to have more services offered for my patients at affordable prices. And I have big plans.”
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This Documentarian Is Filming Incredible Vets — and Helping Them at the Same Time
Ski fans have been enjoying movies by the pioneering snow sport documentarian Warren Miller for decades. Now Miller’s son Kurt, of Niwot, Colo., is filming sports-themed documentaries with a new purpose: to show injured veterans and other people with disabilities participating in adaptive sports. Kurt Miller’s non-profit, Make A Hero, has a Wounded Military Fighter’s Fund that’s currently raising donations to buy a service dog for former Army Corporal Jesse Murphree of Westminster, Colo., who underwent 58 surgeries and lost his both legs after an injury in Afghanistan in 2007.
They’ve raised about $3,500 toward the goal of $6,000 to pay for Jasper, a 2-year-old German shepherd the trainer has already given Murphree on credit. Murphree told Whitney Bryen of the Longmont Times-Call, “I have a partner. It’s the same idea as having a battle buddy in the field watching your back.”
In exchange for providing Murphree with Jasper, the folks at Make A Hero made one request of him: to star in their new film, the water-sports themed The Current. “I’m not really a water guy,” Murphree told Bryen, “but when they asked if I wanted a free trip to Mexico, I figured why not.” In the film, Murphree learns how to scuba dive. Off-screen, he proposed to his girlfriend while in Mexico. The film debuted at the Boulder International Film Festival on Sunday, with the aim to raise the additional donations needed to pay for Jasper. We have a good feeling that they’ll meet their goal.
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This Photographer Is on a Mission to Make People Rethink What Makes a Woman Successful
Denver photographer Suzanne Heintz, a self-described “spinster,” hauls mannequins all over the world to pose in self-portraits that she hopes will have people rethinking how they view single women.
Heintz was tired of people asking whether she was going to ever get married and have kids, according to Jenna Garrett of Feature Shoot. In her ongoing project “Life Once Removed,” Heintz depicts herself with an ecstatic smile enjoying a cup of coffee in a café with her second-hand mannequin husband, standing with him and a mannequin daughter in front of the Eiffel Tower, delirious with joy, serving them Christmas dinner, and hauling them on a toboggan up a mountain.
Heintz told Garrett, “For women, the path to fulfillment is not through one thing, it’s all things—education, career, home, family, accomplishment, enlightenment. If any one of those things is left out, it’s often perceived that there’s something wrong with your life. We are somehow never enough just as we are. We are constantly set up by our expectations to feel as though we are missing something.”
“I’m simply trying to get people to open up their minds and quit clinging to antiquated notions of what a successful life looks like,” she said. And her photos just might do that, while giving everyone a laugh.
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When This Armless Paralympian Couldn’t Feed His Family, He Took Up a Hobby That Changed His Life
Matt Stutzman was born without his arms, but like most kids growing up in rural Fairfield, Iowa, he learned to drive early, and he told Tom McGhee of the Denver Post, “The only accident I was in was when they hit me because they were staring at my feet.” The silver medal-winning Paralympic archer was in Denver last week, telling his inspirational story to disabled people at the Laradon School.
Stutzman had always been an athlete, growing up playing soccer, football, and basketball, as well as hunting. But he didn’t start the sport that would make him well-known until 2010, when he couldn’t find a job, and didn’t know how he was going to feed his wife and kids. It wasn’t the right season to hunt deer with a rifle, but bowhunting was allowed, so his father bought him a bow, and soon he was able to bring home venison for his family.
From the first time Stutzman competed against archers with both arms, he excelled, and a company offered to buy him a bow and become his sponsor. Stutzman sold his old bow to support his family, and used the new one to practice eight hours a day. The sport took him to the Paralympics in London in 2012, where he won the silver medal in archery, losing by a few points to a Jere Forsberg, a wheelchair-bound competitor from Finland.
One of the students Stutzman spoke to, Bryttney Lint, told Tom McGhee, “He touched my heart, he changed my perspective.”
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This Veteran Suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury in Iraq. Now He’s Got a Chance to Win a Medal
All the athletes who qualify for the Paralympics have overcome obstacles to excel at their sports, but perhaps none more so than Army veteran Joel Hunt, who was named to the U.S. Paralympic Alpine Ski Team on Wednesday. Joel Warner profiled Hunt’s quest to make the team last year for Westword, writing, “during his three Iraq deployments, Hunt was exposed to more than 100 improvised explosive-device blasts, explosions that left him with a traumatic brain injury that, among other things, has slowly paralyzed his left leg.” Hunt had to use a wheelchair to get around after his 2007 discharge, and PTSD hit him hard—in a speech he often gives about his story, he says there were times he “wished that I had died in Iraq rather than face the difficulties of my situation.”
But then in 2008, when his health had been deteriorating for years, his parents encouraged him to attend a three-day event in Breckenridge, Colo. to help vets with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) learn to ski. Hunt had begun to leave his wheelchair for walks, and although he was skeptical about skiing, when he tried it, it appealed to him immediately. “Hold on,” Hunt told Warner he remembers thinking, “This is like roller skating.” Operation TBI Freedom bought him a ski pass, and Hunt skied 125 times that winter.
The next winter, Hunt began training at the National Sports Center for the Disabled’s program at Winter Park. The Challenged Athletes Foundation’s Operation Rebound donated the $3500 fee required to participate. Hunt kept at it, improving at ski racing year by year, and in 2013 he qualified for the Paralympic Alpine Development Program in Aspen.
Even with a paralyzed left leg and double vision, Hunt can speed down the slopes, and now he will be the first Paralympic skier with a TBI. He’ll join three other veterans on the Paralympic Alpine Ski Team: Army veteran Heath Calhoun, Coast Guard Veteran Chris Devlin-Young, and Marine Corps veteran Jon Lujan. These vets will head to Sochi to compete at the Paralympic Winter Games from March 7 through 16, offering ski racing fans plenty to cheer about.
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How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share With Others
Denver’s Curtis Bean is an Army veteran who’s finally found his footing in civilian life through art. He enlisted at age 17, served two tours in Iraq as a sniper, and returned home haunted by the memory of a roadside bomb explosion that killed four friends. When those past traumas interfered with his personal life, he enrolled in the Denver VA Medical Center’s program for PTSD, where, he told Kasey Cordell of 5280, “I realized how therapeutic art was for me.” He told Jeremy Hubbard of Fox 31 Denver, “It’s very relaxing, and it helps me get the things that I have in my head out on paper, and hopefully out of my head for good.”
Bean, now 28, is a fine arts student at the University of Colorado in Denver, and runs a program for veterans called the Art of War Project. He offers free art classes for veterans at Hope Tank in Denver, and helped the VA introduce a regular art therapy program, in which he teaches once a week. Bean funds all the art supplies himself through donations and sales of Art of War t-shirts and hats.
Stacey Carroll, a nurse in the Denver VA Medical Center’s PTSD program, told Cordell, “It’s Curtis’ way of paying it forward and he has mad a great impact. The connection he gets—it’s like no other.”
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Meet the Chef Who Believes Everyone Deserves a Five-Star Meal
Deanna Turner trained at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco, and worked at a chef at the upscale Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs before deciding that there were people who needed her culinary artistry more. The 57-year-old Turner, known as Mama Dee to the many who love her, runs the kitchen at the Comitis Crisis Center in Aurora, Colo., serving homeless veterans, runaway teens, and others living in poverty, providing shelter for them in a barracks once used by Fitzsimmons Army Hospital.
Mama Dee marinates and seasons the food with the same care she took when she cooked for paying customers, and pays attention to the presentation of the food on the plate. She remembers the food preferences of each child she serves, making them feel special. “The minute you start to treat a kid like an institutional kid, they start to think of themselves as an institutional kid, and they start to act like an institutional kid,” James Gillespie, the development director of the crisis center told Joey Bunch of the Denver Post.
Mama Dee told Bunch, “Some of these people don’t get a meal for two or three days, so when they get here, I want to make sure it’s good. No matter what they’ve been through, when they get here they’re eating five-star. I can do that for them.” For her work, her town has honored her with the “Amazing Auroran” award.
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