In small towns across Colorado, where economic challenges and limited resources often run deep, a new kind of planning is taking root — one that blends grassroots visioning with technical support, and centers outdoor recreation as a tool for long-term resilience. 

The Colorado Rural Technical Assistance Program, or RTAP, was informed by a growing interest in outdoor recreation as a driver for rural economic development — an interest reflected in national-level programming, such as the Recreation Economy for Rural Communities (RERC) planning assistance initiative. More than 100 communities applied for the RERC pilot program in 2019, with many Colorado communities among them. While several were strong candidates, the program aimed to achieve a broad geographic distribution with only a limited number of spots available. As a result, many Colorado applicants were not selected despite the strength of their proposals. 

This information was shared with the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office (OREC) and Natalie Ooi, a teaching associate professor in the Masters of the Environment Graduate Program (MENV), who saw an opportunity to create a Colorado-specific initiative that could support more communities across the state. In partnership with Matt Nuñez, senior program manager at the OREC, RTAP began to take shape. Using RERC as a model, they designed an accelerated timeline that enables MENV graduate students to co-create, facilitate and execute a community action plan with a community-driven process in a one-semester course. 

“It kind of came together sort of perfectly,” Ooi said. 

Although the course lasts one semester for students, for Ooi and her partners, it’s a yearlong endeavor. From July to December, they work closely with the selected communities to lay groundwork before students begin. This includes building relationships, forming a steering committee and completing a self-assessment. 

“Communities need time to decide if this program is right for them. This isn’t a marketing plan; it’s not a trails development plan,” Ooi said. “At a broad level, we’re really focused on what outdoor recreation means to the community and what they would like to see in terms of tying together outdoor recreation and economic development. We want to give every community the attention they need.” 

Emily Glass, a graduate student in her final year of the MENV program, said she joined the 2025 RTAP cohort after many recommendations from peers. 

“I have always been intrigued by how durable outdoor recreation can be in the midst of the complex social and environmental issues we find ourselves facing,” Glass said. “I believe that a love of being in nature can be a universal human experience, and the joy from that helps bridge our own divides.” 

Community members from Lake City, CO, attend RTAP's two-day community visioning workshop in 2024. Photo credit: Natalie Ooi

In Colorado, outdoor recreation is a powerful tool for economic development, Ooi explained. Outdoor recreation assets and amenities encourage people to spend time and money in these communities — but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. According to Glass, this makes outdoor recreation “a great moldable option for rural communities to build resilience around.” 

In the workshops, which were held in mid-March, topics such as community-identity, sustainable development and responsible recreation, environmental concerns and infrastructure capacity often underpinned the conversations about outdoor recreation development. Sometimes, the focus was on better aligning economic development and tourism initiatives to avoid duplicative efforts. 

“In Leadville, one of their biggest challenges was that it’s a really dedicated bunch of people. But … it’s the same group of 20 to 30 people who do everything,” Ooi said. “Some of our focus was on how do we better coordinate [everyone] to come together and identify who is doing what?” 

In La Junta, RTAP helped connect community organizations with regional partners working toward similar goals, like the broader Regional Partnerships Initiative from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. In Rangely and Dinosaur, RTAP facilitated a joint effort to organize a clean-up day and strengthen the towns’ relationships with the Bureau of Land Management. 

“Part of the work we did was bringing key stakeholders from across the two communities into the same room … and realize, ‘Hey, we have common aims and interests and previous misunderstandings,’” Ooi said. “It’s helped to establish kind of this precedent of ‘we work together out here, even if we’re in different counties.’” 

Now in its third year, Ooi said she is blown away by how communities have shown up to the workshops.  

“We’ve had the best attendance at our community workshops than we’ve had historically,” Ooi said. She credits the rise in attendees to improvements in RTAP’s process and more engaged community contacts. 

Despite strong engagement, Ooi said gaining community trust remains an ongoing challenge — one RTAP is uniquely positioned to meet. 

“The key point of difference [for RTAP] is this plan is entirely community-driven,” Ooi said. “The graduate student team and our partners, we’re just facilitators. We’re not here to say, ‘this needs to go in the plan.’ Nothing should be in there that the community or someone in the community isn’t passionate about.” 

Although not every community member attends the meetings, Ooi said the steering committees are composed to provide a “broader and more representative cross-section" than what is typical in community planning. 

One of the most frequent questions RTAP gets is about funding. While RTAP currently doesn’t have the capacity to provide funds to implement the community action plans, the team hopes to work with OREC to establish seed funding in the future. For now, representatives from Great Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Regional Partnership Initiative and other state agencies attend workshops to help guide long-term funding strategies. In addition, the community action plans developed by students include tools and tips for finding funding and resources, setting priorities, measuring impact and identifying timelines. Colorado State University Extension has recently partnered with RTAP to provide implementation support for the following 12-24 months. 

Despite the challenges, community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 

“It has brought communities together. It has gotten them to understand what meaningful stakeholder engagement can look like, and it’s helped them go for other grants in areas they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Ooi said. 

Like the communities they serve, RTAP has had a lasting impact on students. 

“The RTAP project directed my career after school,” said Conner Borkowski, former MENV student who worked with Leadville in 2023. Borkowski now works as the program and special projects coordinator with the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance.  

Glass shared that working with the Beulah community shaped her understanding of what impactful community-engaged scholarship looks like. 

“When designed meaningfully, community-engaged work is an opportunity to weave together different perspectives, ideas and expertise that otherwise may not have come together … the backbone of community-engaged work is collaboration.” 

The Colorado Rural Technical Assistance Program is funded in part by the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship. Applications for the 2025–26 cohort open Summer 2025.