Sierra Bulk recently attended the Youth and AI Summit at UN Headquarters in New York, where over 700 young people, diplomats, and UN officials gathered to shape a youth-led declaration on AI policy for the UN's Global Digital Compact. The summit centered on two big ideas: AI must be built as a global public good with equitable access for underrepresented regions, and it must preserve, not erase, cultural identity and human connection. As AI's influence grows, the message was clear: real progress depends on inclusive governance, strong safeguards, and keeping young voices in the room.

Ashley Stout’s research explores how children can contribute to community resilience and disaster preparedness—not simply as those who need protection, but as young people with ideas, empathy and perspectives of their own. Drawing on her Georgetown University capstone research with children and adults across Northern Colorado, she examines how imagination, art and intergenerational dialogue can reveal new ways communities might respond to and recover from disasters. Her work asks a powerful question: what might we discover if we stopped preparing children for the future of resilience and started building resilience with them today?

Young people are not simply beneficiaries of development—they can be powerful partners in advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. From entrepreneurship and agriculture to community development and civic engagement, youth-led initiatives are turning local challenges into opportunities while addressing poverty, food security, education and sustainability. The path to global change can begin locally, by giving young people the education, skills, voice and opportunity to turn their ideas into action.

Held in observance of the International Day of Peace under the UN theme "Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day," this conference brings together leaders from community organizations, educational institutions, peace organizations, and faith communities for an afternoon of inspiring messages, music, reflection, and guided meditation. Hosted by the Brahma Kumaris—a global spiritual organization devoted to fostering inner peace and personal transformation through meditation—the event aims to deepen participants' understanding of peace, strengthen a shared commitment to building it, and offer practical ways everyone can contribute to a more peaceful world. Save the date for Saturday, August 29, 2026, from 4:00–6:00 PM, with the venue to be announced.

Okello uses Kenya's proposed Kipeto Green Data Center to argue for a "PastForward" mindset: learning from past technological revolutions rather than assuming AI automatically brings progress. He notes that AI's massive infrastructure demands—power, water, cooling—are often overlooked, and that Africa's real challenge has always been execution and institutions, not vision. The true test, he concludes, isn't whether Africa adopts AI, but whether it can turn that technology into genuine productive capacity rather than dependency or hype.

Education can be more than a pathway to opportunity; it can be a foundation for empowerment and equality. This article explores women’s education in Africa and connects these global challenges to local efforts supporting refugee and immigrant women in Colorado. 

Technology for Global Impact: Building What Matters Next

The next great technology opportunity may not be another fintech platform or social media app. It may be found in the challenges that affect billions of people: poverty, climate resilience, food security, health, and access to basic services.

This personal essay traces the Sierra’s growing commitment to refugee support, from a formative volunteering experience at a Paris soup kitchen through to advocacy work in Colorado. It outlines the 40-year bipartisan history of US refugee assistance under the 1980 Refugee Act, then details the Trump Administration's 2025 dismantling of the US Refugee Admissions Program, which left over 20,000 refugees without support and introduced travel bans targeting crisis-affected countries. The piece closes with the author's volunteer experience at Denver's African Community Center, using it as a call to action for Coloradans to support local refugee organizations amid diminishing federal commitment.

The UNDP AI Hub for Sustainable Development is a G7-endorsed initiative pairing Italy's government with the UN to give African AI innovators access to the compute power, data, and training they've long lacked - and our chapter is working to bring the Hub's team to Colorado Startup Week. The Hub has already engaged over 1,000 innovators and mobilized millions in compute resources across 18 countries, backing startups like DeepLeaf (AI crop-disease detection), Maternanet Africa (maternal healthcare), and FriendnPal (multilingual mental health support). Colorado's strength in cloud infrastructure, agtech, and health-tech makes it a natural partner for these innovators as they look to scale globally.

Our Kenyan writer from Kisumu makes a personal appeal to Colorado readers, arguing that America's next great investment opportunity isn't a mineral or a market, but Kenya's educated, underemployed youth. Drawing parallels between America's historic resilience (from the Civil War to 9/11) and Kenya's own never-give-up spirit, the piece frames Kenya as stable, welcoming, and full of untapped potential in education, digital connectivity, and creative industries. It closes with a direct call to action: a modern, grassroots version of the Marshall Plan, built not by governments but by everyday American citizens willing to invest in Kenya's future.

What does it really mean to protect wildlife? From elephants living in protected habitats in Kenya to the return of gray wolves in Colorado, conservation is about more than saving individual species. It is also about restoring ecosystems, supporting the people who live alongside wildlife, and finding solutions where both people and animals can thrive.

Gabriella de la Torre turns a childhood spent between Colorado and Bolivia into a meditation on global citizenship—showing how her family's homeland, often reduced to "where is that?" in conversation, is actually grappling with melting glaciers, water shortages, and a lithium boom with global stakes. She traces surprising threads back to her own state, revealing how Colorado's clean energy future is quietly tangled up in Bolivian mountains and communities thousands of miles away.

The Jones Act was created to protect American shipbuilding, maritime labor, and national security—but more than a century later, the fleet it was meant to preserve has steadily declined. This post examines the law’s enduring strategic strengths, its economic costs, the growing reliance on waivers, and the central question facing policymakers today: is the Jones Act still strengthening U.S. maritime capacity, or has its protectionist structure begun to undermine its own goals?

By: Sierra Bulk - My first introduction to human trafficking was at fourteen, when I discovered the book Sold by Patricia McCormick. It told the story of Lakshmi, a girl my age from Nepal, who was sold into sexual slavery in India. The only word to describe how I felt after finishing the book was horrified. It was fictional but heavily based on truth. According to the United Nations International Labor Organization, an estimated 30 to 50 million people are currently enslaved and trafficked worldwide, generating about $230 billion in annual profits…

When the federal government shut down NOAA’s Climate.gov team, former staff rebuilt its 15-year archive as Climate.us, preserving vital public climate information with strong ties to Boulder’s NOAA and CU research community. The revival is worth supporting, but it also raises an important question: how should historical material—especially older uses of the extreme RCP8.5 scenario—be updated or clearly labeled to reflect current scientific thinking?