Press Releases

K-12 Students to Make Plans to Change the World
Naropa University hosts 2007 Public Achievement Regional Conference

BOULDER, Colo. (March 8, 2007)—A group of inspired K-12 students from Colorado and Minnesota will be given time to come up with a “larger-than-life plan” to improve their world at this year’s Public Achievement Regional Conference. Maybe it will be poverty, maybe healthcare—it could be anything they feel is important. The students will work on the project in concert from their home states through the end of the school year and into the summer.

Naropa University will host the 2007 Public Achievement Regional Conference April 12-13, 2007. It is the first time that the conference has been held outside of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Achievement at the University of Minnesota, where Public Achievement was founded.

“Public Achievement has been in an expansion mode since 1997,” says Dennis Donovan, National Organizer. “With all the good work that is going on in Colorado, the time is right to have an event out west to celebrate and learn from each other. We hope to create a different type of democracy and citizen involvement that includes young people not as spectators, but as players on the democracy field as public problem-solvers.”

The conference includes a trip to Centaurus High School in Lafayette, where all conference attendees will listen to a presentation by high school seniors who graduated from a one-year Public Achievement program coached by Naropa students last year. This year, the same high school seniors have taken the initiative to coach students in a similar program at Angevine Middle School, also in Lafayette.

Accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Naropa University is a private, nonprofit, nonsectarian liberal arts institution dedicated to advancing contemplative education. This approach to learning integrates the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions, helping students know themselves more deeply and engage constructively with others. The university comprises a four-year undergraduate college and graduate programs in the arts, education, environmental leadership, psychology and religious studies.

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