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My grandma laughs when she describes the Boulder she arrived in. There were things she and my grandpa Joe were used to buying back East: prosciutto, certain groceries, little luxuries that simply did…
My grandma laughs wh…
My grandma laughs when she describes the Boulder she arrived in. There were things she and my grandpa Joe were used to buying back East: prosciutto, certain groceries, little luxuries that simply didn't exist here. There weren't many restaurants. The only place you could get liquor was outside the city, and if you brought it into town it had to be in a brown bag. Pearl Street had a hardware store. There were horse ranges not far from downtown. They arrived at the end of December 1961 with two babies: my aunt Becky and my dad, Sean, who was two months old. Boulder still felt rural, a county b…
Adrienne Markey
March 11, 2026
Dream Tank’s Systems Change Lab was supposed to be a build sprint: practical tools, real-world testing, something a city could hold in its hands. Then the tragic events of December 13th happened …
Dream Tank’s Syste…
Dream Tank’s Systems Change Lab was supposed to be a build sprint: practical tools, real-world testing, something a city could hold in its hands. Then the tragic events of December 13th happened at Brown University, and the project became deeply relevant. Heidi Cuppari, Dream Tank’s founder and a Brown alumna, responded the way she often does: with presence, optimism, and an insistence that care is part of the work. She helped our group name what we needed next, which wasn’t another framework. It was fluency in trauma as biology: how stress reshapes the brain, interrupts memory, an…
Adrienne Markey
February 16, 2026
In Boulder, winter has a particular kind of light: bright enough to make you feel hopeful, sharp enough to make you feel honest. That was the container I was in during Dream Tank’s two-week S…
In Boulder, winter h…
In Boulder, winter has a particular kind of light: bright enough to make you feel hopeful, sharp enough to make you feel honest. That was the container I was in during Dream Tank’s two-week Systems Change Lab, where a cohort of Brown University students and a circle of mentors convened to prototype a toolkit cities could actually use to guide systems change. The sprint built toward DREAMCAST, a live broadcast where we shared what we learned and what we were daring to try next: youth vision moving toward collective action. One of our goals was to bring this work directly to cit…
Adrienne Markey
February 6, 2026
Every day that us Boulder students go to school, we prepare—quietly—for the possibility of a bullet. That sentence should sound impossible. Instead, it sounds familiar. I think I learned that fam…
Every day that us Bo…
Every day that us Boulder students go to school, we prepare—quietly—for the possibility of a bullet. That sentence should sound impossible. Instead, it sounds familiar. I think I learned that familiarity long before I understood it. It started, for me, with a license plate. The License Plate I Didn't Understand Yet When I was little, my mom drove me around Colorado in a car that wore one of the prettiest license plates I’d ever seen: a columbine flower floating in a blue-sky background, a soft lavender stripe, and two simple words stamped across the bottom, “Respect Life.” …
Adrienne Markey
December 29, 2025
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