Collaborative effort brings more employment opportunities to rural Colorado students

FLORENCE, Colo. (KRDO) - An up-and-coming business campus and co-working space, "Emergent Campus," is working with local high schools and colleges in Southern Colorado to provide new internship and work-study opportunities to rural students.

"We were taught to go find a wonderful opportunity somewhere else," said Emergent Campus co-founder and Canyon City high school grad Chris Koehn. "We saw the opportunity to create new pathways, opportunities and hope for students to do what they desire, and learn they want to desire, and then make an impact in their own community."

The US Department of Labor recently bolstered its efforts. Among other partners, the department awarded $5.75 million to Trinidad State College and Pueblo Community College and Trinidad State College to create a formal educational track engraining Emergent Campus into the schools' curriculum.

"The program that I would say, changed the course of my life," Dimitri Zamarripa said.

Zamarripa was an intern in the original Emergent Campus program, and now is a team lead for 3 Rocks, one of the partnered companies in the new grant initiative.

"I was thinking I was just going to go to college. It was just a pathway, but it wasn't really passion, and that's a lot of what I found through the internship with 3 Rocks," he said.

Emergent Campus now has two locations, one in Florence and one in Trinidad.