After years of air pollution releases at the Suncor oil and gas refinery in Commerce City, Colo., Olga Gonzalez is glad to see plans for real-time air monitors in the largely Latinx neighborhoods around the facility.
She isn t sure people in the community are ready to trust the company, the state or the city to run those networks.
“Our own independent monitors would inspire greater trust amongst our community,” Gonzalez said. “That’s what we re trying to do here.”
Gonzalez is the executive director of Cultivando, a Commerce City nonprofit that helps residents get involved in local politics. The organization is now bidding to build air monitors to track pollutants escaping the Suncor facility, Colorado’s only oil and gas refinery.
Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
A Colorado State University center partially funded by the Chinese government will close its doors later this year after Congress restricted funding for universities that host these programs.
There are hundreds of Confucius Institutes across the globe. Named after the famed Chinese philosopher, CSU’s Confucius Institute offers Chinese language and culture classes to the community at large.
These education centers have faced bipartisan opposition in recent years, mainly due to its reliance on Chinese government funding. The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which passed Congress on New Year’s Day after an override of a presidential veto, included language that restricted Department of Defense research funding at universities that host a Confucius Institute.
Jenny Brundin/CPR News
Jennifer Muñoz balances child care, full-time work and her pursuit of a bachelor s degree from Metro State University Denver.
Jennifer Muñoz rises at 5:30 a.m., works a full-time job and then hits the books. In between cooking for her 12-year-old daughter, she studies for her bachelor’s degree. She was going to wait until her daughter was older to go back to school but the pandemic jolted her.
“You get your education, you get a better job, you get better housing, you get better healthcare,” said the 37-year-old.
Muñoz is all “A’s” so far in her second semester, working toward a social work degree. It hasn’t been easy. A peer mentor from Metropolitan State University Denver checks on her weekly.
Editor s note: Minari won a Golden Globe in 2021 for Best Foreign Language Film and has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Our original story continues below.
When director Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari” premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, word-of-mouth about it being one of the best movies traveled fast. The recommendations bore out and the film eventually won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category. It would go on to win a number of festival awards, including two from the Denver Film Festival, before its Feb. 12 premiere in theaters.
Laurel Smith/For CPR News
Lupita works on oral language skills while making a wooden snowman with her granddaughter Sofia on Jan. 5, 2021.
Fifty-four-year-old Lupita’s alarm clock goes off at 6:00 a.m. It’s still dark outside.
She immediately starts to cook eggs and gets cereal out for her first guest, who’ll arrive in about 15 minutes.
The silence of her home will soon be broken by the shouts of three preschoolers, one of them her granddaughter. They’ll be under her care for the next 12 hours. Then Lupita will clean the house for an hour or two and finally fall into bed.