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Youth as Changemakers: Advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals
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.
Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day
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.
PASTFORWARD
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, Opportunity, and Women’s Empowerment in Africa
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.
UNA To Come To Colorado Start-Up Week - 16th Sept 930-1030 - Alliance Center, Denver
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.
How the Trump Administration’s Cuts to Refugee Programs Harm Our Communities — And Why Supporting Local Agencies Matters
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.
Bringing Africa's AI Innovators to Boulder: Inside the UNDP AI Hub for Sustainable Development
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.
Kenya's Investment Call: Why Colorado Should Answer
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.
Across Borders, Across Species: The Fight to Protect Wildlife
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.
More Than a Destination: What Bolivia Taught Me About Global Citizenship By: Gabriella de la Torre
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 Built for National Security. Is It Still Delivering?
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?
NGOs at the Front Lines: Why Policy Alone Can’t End Modern-Day Slavery - By: Sierra Bulk
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…
Preserving Climate Knowledge Means Preserving Its Context - From Climate.gov to Climate.us: Why This Story Matters in Boulder
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?
Your News You Never See: What Colorado's Anniversary Year Can Teach Us About the World We Actually Live In
This article argues that social media's engagement-driven algorithms distort our view of the world by amplifying rare violence while burying the far more common story of sustained peace and prosperity. Anchored in a rare convergence of 2026 anniversaries - Colorado's 150th, America's 250th, the UN's 80th, and 90 years since Haile Selassie's League of Nations speech - it shows how institutions built after past catastrophes have coincided with historic gains in human welfare, even as feeds train us to mistake conflict for the norm. Reframing the Fukuyama–Huntington debate as a case study in the same bias, it closes by calling on readers to act as local force multipliers for the slower, unglamorous progress that never trends but keeps quietly winning.
More Than a Children's Home: My Day in Mombasa, Kenya
As we stood outside the gates in Mombasa, Kenya, we had no idea what to expect. There were three of us volunteering for the day at a children's home, confused, thinking we had the wrong address. Then, before the gates had even finished opening, six children came sprinting toward us. Before I could say hello, two little girls, Mwanasiti and Monica, wrapped their arms around my waist while another reached for my hand. They didn't know my name, where I came from, or how long I would stay. They were simply excited that someone had come to spend time with them…
Colorado’s Aerospace Ambitions Meet Space Diplomacy at the Inaugural New Frontiers Diplomacy Forum
On July 28, 2026, WorldDenver’s inaugural New Frontiers Diplomacy Forum at Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in Denver—presented by Lockheed Martin Space and featuring a keynote by NASA’s Meredith McKay—examined how Colorado can strengthen its position as a leading aerospace hub through talent development (bolstered by the state’s new No. 1 ranking in U.S. News education), public-private and international collaboration, AI and quantum applications, and a shift toward sustainable practices addressing space debris via a more circular economy, while underscoring that competition and cooperation must coexist and that governance must keep pace with rapid technological change in the broader realm of space diplomacy.
Why Humanitarian Issues Require More Than Aid: The Role of Law, Policy, and Community
The role of law in humanitarian action
The number of armed conflicts across the world is on the rise, in addition to them lasting longer, becoming harder to resolve, and becoming increasingly deadly for innocent civilians forced to bear the consequences of such conflicts. Global divisions also seem to be deepening, worsening the stability and safety of countries already facing deadly conflicts. Ending and preventing such conflicts will require investment in international cooperation initiatives, conflict resolution, and additional measures to resolve disputes…
Reading Frank Vogl on Iran: What He Gets Right, and What He Leaves Unanswered
Reframing Iran’s foreign policy through the lens of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s kleptocratic grip on the economy, as Frank Vogl proposes, offers a provocative explanation for why negotiations with Tehran may repeatedly fall short. As a UNA Chapter committed to multilateralism, diplomacy, and negotiated peace, we may find Vogl’s prescriptions difficult to reconcile with our values, yet his analysis raises an uncomfortable question: how can we negotiate in good faith when the interests of those across the table may be fundamentally opposed to the openness and reform diplomacy seeks to encourage?
Security Council LIVE: Can critical minerals fuel peace instead of conflict?
The Security Council is meeting now in New York to debate critical minerals — the lithium, cobalt and copper powering the clean energy transition. Demand is set to triple by 2030. The question: will this mineral wealth build peace and prosperity, or fund conflict and corruption? Follow live updates throughout the day.
This Week In Geopolitics
The United States fought a shooting war over a strait it does not own, moved to disable a court it never joined, and drew a UN human rights referral from its own southern neighbour. All in seven days.