Andrea

There is a need for upskilling, reskilling, onboarding, and rebounding training to ensure a vital workforce.  Employers directly benefit from investing in their employees through education, training, and development. Additionally, investing in staff results in increased productivity, engagement, and organizational success. Our rural Colorado workforce has changed over the past two years with more remote workers, up to five generations working in the workforce, globalization, high housing prices, lack of affordable housing, and lack of child care options or cost. There are pockets of progress and innovative ideas on these issues, although we continue to struggle. Roaring Fork Leadership (RFL), [...]

Q & A with Julie Warren, RFL Academy 2013 Alumni In 2019, Julie Warren suffered the devastating loss of her 16-year-old daughter, Anna, after a three-year battle with Ewing’s Sarcoma. That year she started the ALC Foundation to honor her daughter by raising money for organizations that support families fighting pediatric cancer. As the Chief Marketing Officer for the River Valley Ranch Golf Course and co-owner with her husband, Red Cunningham, of the Homestead Bar & Grill in Carbondale, Warren came to RFL Academy 2013 hoping to improve her management and leadership skills, with the goal of building better a [...]

Empathy……a lost skill. by Andrea Palm-Porter   Emotional Intelligence (EQ or EI) has more impact on one’s success in life compared to IQ. Developing your EQ is one of the most important skills to have as a human being and successful leader. To top this off, 72 percent of business leaders are stating the need for more empathy in their organization for sustainable business success in today’s workplace. To that end, we need more empathy and people willing to be vulnerable in our organizations, with each other, and on our planet. At our February RFL Academy session, the topic was Emotional [...]

Austin Klise, RFL Academy 2018 Alumni, moved to Africa in 2019 (Sierra Leone). He's pretty far out in the bush and is working with, First Things First, an organization working with locals who have good ideas and want to help themselves and their community. Austin’s work feels similar to his experience working in the RFL civic project team, only now as a full-time job in Africa. Austin shares that it’s been a wild experience applying the RFL lessons in a third world country with a completely different value system, social system, etc. For example, nobody lives as an "individual" everyone is defined by their collective [...]

Where are you originally from? Annapolis, Maryland What brought you to the Roaring Fork Valley and how long have you been here? My job with Design Workshop brought me to the valley and I’ve been here 3.5 years. What was your most interesting or unusual job? My most interesting job was working at Philmont Scout Ranch for 9 seasons. One summer I led a living history homesteading camp complete with an historic turn of the century farmhouse, chickens, burros, a cow and calf, sheep, pigs, a vegetable garden and 100 eager boy scouts everyday to help us with homesteading chores. Why did [...]