The Children Who Will Inherit Our World
For seventeen years, Mara Mintzer and Growing Up Boulder have invited children to help shape their community, offering a glimpse of what becomes possible when young voices are heard.
On an autumn afternoon in Boulder, sunlight slips through the branches of a tree, casting restless shadows across the ground. Most adults would pass without giving them much thought. But when Mara Mintzer and her colleagues worked with a local preschool on a tree canopy project, they discovered that even babies were captivated by the dancing shadows of deciduous leaves. Long before children could explain what they loved about nature, they were showing the adults around them how they experienced it.
For Mara, co-founder and executive director of Growing Up Boulder, observations like these have inspired seventeen years of work devoted to bringing children's perspectives into decisions about their communities. Since 2009, the organization has engaged more than 10,000 young people across over 100 projects, offering a glimpse of Boulder's familiar streets and public spaces as children experience them. Children have imagined more welcoming parks and safer ways to move through their neighborhoods. Their ideas often begin with the simple pleasures of childhood, a tree to climb or a place to watch animals, but they reveal something adults can easily overlook about what makes a community feel like home.
When the Marshall Fire devastated Boulder County in December 2021, the meaning of home became painfully fragile. Families lost houses filled with birthday photographs and beloved possessions, while children faced the bewildering absence of places that had once made their world feel familiar. In the aftermath, Growing Up Boulder invited more than 130 children and young adults to explore how nature might help their community recover. Through its Eco-Healing project, their perspectives helped inspire conceptual landscape designs for the fire-affected area. Amid the grief and uncertainty of rebuilding, young people were given a chance to imagine how their surroundings might once again offer comfort.
What makes Mara's leadership remarkable is the care she takes with those ideas long after the children have shared them. During a recent conversation, she described community projects that required six, eleven, and even fourteen years to reach completion. She affectionately calls herself the “elephant memory,” returning to planners and public officials to remind them what children once envisioned. By the time a project becomes reality, those children may be teenagers or adults with lives far removed from the classrooms where their ideas first took shape. Mara remembers them anyway.
Her work carries a significance far beyond Colorado. As children around the world grow up amid conflict, displacement, and a changing climate, the decisions being made about their futures are increasingly consequential. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes their right to be heard in matters affecting them. Through Boulder's partnership with UNICEF USA on the Child Friendly Cities Initiative, Mara is helping bring that promise into the everyday life of a city, where children's perspectives can help inform the places they will someday inherit.
The babies who watched the shifting shadows of autumn leaves could not explain why they were drawn to them, yet their delight revealed something about how even the youngest children experience the world. Mara recognized that their curiosity deserved the same thoughtful attention given to the ideas of older children, and that understanding has helped shape a remarkable body of work in Boulder.
For seventeen years, Mara Mintzer has listened to children whose imaginations reach beyond the boundaries of what adults might think possible. She has carried their ideas through years of planning, through changing priorities and the slow passage of childhood into adulthood. And somewhere in Boulder, a child may one day walk beneath the branches of a tree, play in a park, or find comfort in a familiar neighborhood without ever knowing that another child helped imagine it years before. Mara will remember.
