Current
Big Green Rabbit. The CYE Center serves as the Educational Advisory Board for the BIG GREEN RABBIT, a new initiative in childrens media. The purpose of the initiative is to use television, books, music CDs, videos/DVDs, e-magazines, the Internet and live events to promote healthy eating habits and exercise in engaging ways while inspiring childrens connection to nature. <more>
Child-Friendly Istanbul. The focus of this project is on creating a liveable Istanbul where the public realm meets the needs of its children regardless of their ethnic, social, economic, and cultural background, and in turn, becomes a good city for all residents. <more>
Growing Up in Boulder: Glimpses of Childhood in Local History. CYE interns are gathering data about places and events from diaries, oral histories, and other archival sources to provide glimpses of childhood experiences in Boulder in earlier times. <more>
Intergenerational Mural. The CYE Center is partnering with the Society for Creative Aging and Horizons K-8 Alternative School in the creation of a mural for the entrance of the CYE Center. Elder Artists are working with students to create a multi-dimensional representation of a child-friendly community. <more>
The Place of Children. The CYE Center is preparing a book about children living in poverty in cities around the world. The book will educate the public about the capacities of the urban poor by illustrating the active roles of children in improving their living conditions. <more>
PLACES. Efforts to involve children and youth in the visioning of child-friendly urban spaces tend to be limited in scope and impact—even though several initiatives testify to the benefits of such participation. PLACES aims to change that by locating community research within schools, which offer the capacity for long-term partnerships. <more>
SEED@CU: Analyzing the Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Sustainable Community Development. CYE is participating in an interdisciplinary project, involving faculty and graduate students from six CU Schools and Colleges, studying the life cycle of social entrepreneurs. <more>
Urban Hens. The Urban Hens project aims to develop a sustainable model for re-introducing chickens in Boulder backyards, providing children with an opportunity to learn more about a local food source. <more>
Youth Leaders Study. The Youth Leaders Study aims to identify factors that hinder or support youth who live in poverty in assuming roles of responsibility in their communities. <more>
Completed
Building and Growing on Common Ground. In this collaborative project, undergraduates and graduates from CU work with students at a K-12 school for special-needs and at-risk youth in Lafayette, Colorado, to create and maintain a vegetable garden and a straw-bale greenhouse. <more>
Building Civic Engagement by Building Affordable Housing in a University Without Walls. Through this project, students gain hands-on experience in the construction of an affordable housing unit using sustainable building technology that combines straw bales with a mobile home core. The project will also provide students with a better understanding of the causes of the affordable housing deficit and ameliorative approaches. Tangible outcome will be a completed housing unit, meeting local codes and standards, which will be made available to a low-income household. In progress. <more>
Caring for Colorado. This grant funded a year long study at Remington, Eagleton and Munroe elementary schools in Denver for the purposes of fostering children's participation and awareness of physical activity and the use of their playground. This phase was accomplished by working in collaboration with physical activity specialists from the University of Colorado Denver and the PE teachers at these three schools. <more>
Children’s Guide to Active Living. An analysis of children’s use, negotiation and perceptions of their local environment for physical activity <more>
Community Design and Public Health. This project will study an established community activity, community gardening, for its potential to promote public health through increased physical activity, nutrition, social engagement and cognitive stimulation with the long-term public health goals of disease prevention and health promotion. <more>
Community Preferences at the Family Learning Center. In the spring of 2010, ENVD students learned how to integrate community needs and preferences into planning and design, while evaluating how the needs of children and youth in a local community were being met in order to develop suggestions for action. <more>
Denver’s Child- and Youth-Friendly City Initiative. This Initiative aimed to ensure Denver’s children and youth have a voice and are decision makers in their communities; strengthen people and places that make children and youth feel recognized and valued in Denver; and support the healthy development of Denver’s children and youth. <more>
Design Camp at Gold Crown Foundation. In summer 2006, CYE partnered with the Gold Crown Foundation in Lakewood, CO, to offer two one-week design and planning camps. The goal was for youth to use a variety of communication tools and ultimately take interest in a design or planning career. <more>
Design Camp at Horizons Alternative K-8 School. Students at Horizons Alternative K-8 school in Boulder completely re-designed their sandbox during a two-week “Design Camp.” Each week we worked with 12 to 13 children, ranging in age from 6- to 11-years old and taught them about the design process, including basic design principles such as incorporating symmetry, creating gateways, and framing views. <more>
Designing an Environmental Courtyard. A dozen undergraduates from different departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked in a service-learning course with students at Creekside elementary school to co-design an environmental courtyard. <more>
Development of a City-Wide SR2S Model in Denver and Its Application at Munroe Elementary School. This project aims to: (1) provide children, parents, and other community stakeholders with a method for communicating their concerns about the safety of the Westwood neighborhood and (2) address these concerns through a comprehensive approach tailored to the needs of their neighborhood and based on the "4 E's": Education, Engineering, Enforcement, and Encouragement. <more>
Garden as Art: Photos of Nature's Foison. A photographic tour of a project that enriched the environmental design learning experience while helping alleviate local hunger. <download PDF>
Grounding Environmental Design: Learning through a Collaborative Garden. The design, development, and maintenance of a campus vegetable garden in collaboration with a local school and other community partners to provide environmental design students with a valuable hands-on learning experience, while helping meet the need for food of local households living in poverty. In progress. <more>
“How Can They Look So Happy?” Reconstructing the Place of Children After Hurricane Katrina: Images and Reflections.
Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the Gulf Coast, Jennifer Kirschke, a professional photographer in the Visual Resource Center at UCD’s College of Architecture and Planning, visited the area to interview and photograph some of the children whose lives were affected by the disaster. <more>
If They Build It, Will They Come? An Evaluation of the Effects of the Redevelopment of Inner-City School grounds on the Physical Activity of Children. This study examines how the redevelopment of inner-city school playgrounds into Learning Landscapes influences children's physical activity levels, and how neighborhood social processes may mediate the impact of these environmental interventions. In progress. <more>
Landscapes of Childhood Remembered: Narratives of Centenarians. This study records the childhood recollections of Colorado centenarians through semi-structured, one-on-one interviews and subject-drawn memory maps of their childhood environments. The research will benefit local historians and urban planners, providing valuable perspectives on the enduring influence of place on individual life histories. In progress. <more>
Learning Landscapes seeks to connect graduate students in the College of Architecture and Planning with communities through civic engagement – planning, designing and building playgrounds in partnership with schools and communities. The Learning Landscapes program is no longer part of CYE and maintains its own website at www.learninglandscapes.org.
Lost Girls of the Sudan Find Their Voices. This Project involves the production of a documentary film and photo exhibit on the Lost Girls of Sudan in order to bring to a wide audience the compelling stories of these refugees, settled in the Denver-Boulder area. <more>
Mapleton School Project. In the Fall 2008, students of class ENVD3152, an Introduction to Computer-Aided Design, measured and produced a set of as-built plans and elevations of Boulder’s historic Mapleton Elementary School, built in 1889 and vacant since 2003, when Boulder Valley School District closed it. <more>
Neighborhood Atlas Project. NAP integrates research, pedagogy and action to examine young people's use, experience and perspectives about their local environment. The NAP is a model program in geography and environmental education that informs neighborhood planning and community development projects. <more>
Photovoice. This project used “participatory photography” a study abroad studio of environmental design students. It aimed to involve children in the master planning of Yali, a new municipality in a fast-growing tourism region of southwestern Turkey, the Bodrum Peninsula. <more>
Planning, Participation and the Restoration of Safe Places: Environmental impacts on youth in northwest Denver. In recent months, the popular media and the academic press have highlighted new research into the impacts of environmental conditions on the health and well being of children and youth living in poverty. Researchers are increasingly finding that incidences of childhood asthma, chronic illness and lead poisoning are related to the hazardous conditions in which many young people - especially youth of color - live. <more>
Renewable Energy on Tribal Lands. National design competition among Native American youth to create a fundraising stamp that will support scholarships for Native American students working toward finding renewable energy solutions. The winning design has been submitted to the USPS Citizens Stamp Selection Committee. <more>
Safe Routes to School: Children's Use and Perceptions of Globeville. A collaborative research project of the University of Colorado and Garden Place Academy to understand how children use and perceive their local environment in Globeville, a neighborhood in northwest Denver. The overall goal of this research was to assist planners, parents, children, and teachers in their efforts to create safe routes to school. <download PDF> (34mb)
“Streets of Hope: Images and Impressions by Homeless Youth Around the World.” Depicting life on the streets, in foster homes, in shelters, and in shacks, the photographs were taken by 121 homeless children from 11 countries all over the world. The children participated in an international project that resulted in the book, Home/Life: 121 Kids from 11 Cities Photograph Their World, published in 2002 by the Homeless World Foundation. <more>
Tracing Transitions: Displaced Jefferson Students Speak Out. What happened to the students who recently walked the halls of Jefferson High School? How did the closure affect them? How are they doing in their new schools? Given the prospect of future school closures, it is important that district officials and policymakers draw lessons from the experiences of these students. <more>
Umap. Umap is a participatory community mapping process to facilitate social action and neighborhood change in a way that is based on residents' everyday lives, perceptions, values, assets and needs. <more>
Youth FACE IT (Fostering Active Community Engagement for Integration and Transformation). Youth FACE IT is an interdisciplinary program created in 2008 by researchers at the Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design (CYE). It provides opportunities for university students to work directly with multicultural high-school youth to reflect on their experiences in the community and identify recommendations for community change. <more>