FLORENCE — The sign on the grassy expanse in front of the building reads “Fremont Middle School Huskies.” The words “Florence High School” are inscribed above the stately Doric columns.
While the banging of locker doors and echoes of student laughter have long departed, the historic building is carrying on a similar mission by giving aspiring entrepreneurs a place to test their ideas and rub shoulders with other tech workers while providing interns and young adults an opportunity for entry-level jobs in such things as cybersecurity, data management and AI.
Since opening in late 2019, Emergent Campus Florence, 215 N. Maple Ave., has filled the old classrooms with 18 businesses and 120 employees. In the past decade, the creation of about 130 new tech jobs in the region has an annual economic impact of about $13 million, said Brad Rowland, co-owner and general manager of the campus.
Even without a sign.
That success has attracted statewide recognition for Emergent Campus as a model for building a rural tech economy.
In the last year, The tech hub and its partners received more than $9 million in state and federal grants to expand to Trinidad, where Emergent Campus Trinidad, 612 Park St., opened in July. It has three tech startups and seven people using co-working space for their businesses so far, and numerous businesses have signed on to offer internships.
It’s also in an old school building, leasing an unused wing of Trinidad Middle School, which is directly across the street from Emergent partner Trinidad State College, or TSC.
President Rhonda Epper said the grants will allow the college to expand tech training and advanced manufacturing courses, in areas such as robotics, and upgrade industrial trades programs, on its campuses in Trinidad and Alamosa. “Community colleges need to drive economic development and creation of the jobs we don’t have,” Epper said in an interview. “We need to drive shared prosperity in our communities. It’s a new role for community colleges, but I think we have a role to play to attract businesses, to grow businesses.”
Boosting rural tech
Tech workers began moving from high-cost cities to rural areas long before the COVID pandemic. If their job allowed them to work remotely, all they needed was reliable high-speed internet. And some rural communities invested in those capabilities.
Though nobody really had a handle on where those workers were living and working, the nonprofit Fremont Economic Development Corp., or FEDC, thought it could encourage some of them to live in the county if it provided some training and collaboration resources.
Rowland, who moved to Cañon City from Silicon Valley in 2013, volunteered with FEDC and offered to help “solve the rural tech problem.” Which wasn’t so much a problem as a mystery — who were the remote tech workers, what resources did they need and how could Fremont County attract more?
By late 2016 FEDC had leased the upper floor of an historic downtown building on Main Street to house TECHStart. It offered 20 offices and a conference room, and the space was soon filled. There were meet-ups and lunches. Ideas blossomed into businesses.
In September 2017 it launched internship programs with Cañon City and Florence high schools. It partnered with Pueblo Community College’s Fremont Campus.
In March 2018, the state designated its second technology sector partnership in Region 13, which includes the Upper Arkansas River corridor communities in Fremont, Chaffee, Lake and Custer counties. The partnership includes businesses, schools, colleges, multicounty economic development leaders and government agencies.
That organization is now called the South Central Tech Sector Partnership, and includes Huerfano and Las Animas counties (from Region 14). Trinidad is in Las Animas County.
Creating the tech sector partnership allowed for greater collaboration and gave members access to resources such as state and federal grants and technical assistance, Diana Armstrong, who oversees partnerships in tech, health and child development for FEDC, said at a recent online panel on Empowering a Rural Tech Renaissance.
There were grants for distance learning and workforce development. Things were booming and “we were running out of space,” Rowland said.
That was about the time the Florence School District planned to close its old middle school and put the building on the market.
Rowland and Chris Koehn, who owns an IT and accounting services company called Second-61, found an investor and purchased the building for $515,000 in August 2019.
A campus emerges
Renovations of the 80,000-square-foot middle school building began immediately and by December, the first businesses were moving in. It was none too soon.
Second-61 had outgrown its space at TECHStart, where it was founded by Koehn, a Fremont County native. He didn’t want to move it out of the area because by that time he was promoting what he called “rural reshoring” — bringing jobs to rural areas instead of outsourcing them overseas.
As a co-owner of Emergent Campus, he had room for his growing business — it’s in the former school library — and he could help bring others into the fold.
Things were going so well that they decided to have a one-day workshop-style conference at Emergent Campus for what is now known as the South Central Tech Sector Partnership. There would be brainstorming sessions, sharing of stories and tours of the still-being-renovated building.
It was set for March 13, 2020 — auspicious as the day the president declared a national emergency because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus.
The workshop went on, although there was nervous chatter about whether anyone should be there at all.
But there they were, talking about the high-speed fiber infrastructure, workforce grants, and the growing opportunity for young people to find living-wage jobs in their own community. They showed off the co-working space and talked about internships and mentors.
And then the world shut down.
“The first two years of COVID were rough,” Rowland said in an interview. He had to get — and keep — businesses in the building to pay the mortgage. And while the focus for Emergent Campus is tech companies and startups, it also welcomes “tech adjacent” businesses.
One of the building’s early tenants was Optimum Guidance Behavior Consulting, which offers a mental health service clinic for children and youth, ages 2-21, as well as some adult services.
“We stayed alive (during the pandemic) through telehealth services,” regional director Theresa Benavidez said.
The clinic now has about 30 clients and a “huge wait list,” she said, and it’s always looking for board-certified behavior analysts. It also provides some in-school and in-home services.
One of the clinic’s teen clients landed an internship with another Emergent Campus tenant, Barn Owl Precision Agriculture, which is developing robots in the former band room to assist farmers. The teen loved the work and is now employed by Barn Owl.
That’s the kind of story that makes Rowland’s day. People finding something they love to do and being able to get the certifications and experience they need to get a job right in their own community.
“It’s the people. That’s what’s important,” he says repeatedly while giving a tour of the campus and noting that it’s a “100-year-old building with 150 years of deferred maintenance. It’s been a lot harder than we thought.”
When asked about the lack of a sign on the building, he shook his head, smiled and said it’s on the list. “Yeah, we need to get a sign.”
Expanding the vision
The nooks and crannies of Emergent Campus are filled with businesses such as TyeDyeSheep, which provides videography services and hosts a wildly popular “Star Wars” video game podcast. There’s a furniture maker, a Bible translation service and a service desk for a dairy farm. There’s a guy designing a device to track teeth grinding and there are church services in the auditorium on Sundays.
For $60 a month, individuals can use the drop-in workspace anytime — and on some Wednesdays even get free pizza.
Emergent Campus also became home to a satellite office for Pax8, a cloud services company with clients worldwide. Headquartered in Greenwood Village, the company now has 18 satellite locations, said Rowland, who joined the company about a year ago and is vice president for product marketing. Pax8’s first satellite office was in Emergent Campus.
Pax8 said in a statement it was lured by the modern workspace and infrastructure provided by Emergent Campus as well as the local talent pool.
Rowland said he’d like to see more companies take advantage of rural satellite offices.
Satellite offices allow large companies to hire talented rural workers who don’t want to move to cities where housing costs, congestion and other factors don’t fit their desired lifestyle. Both Emergent Campuses focus on the outdoor and relaxed lifestyle their communities offer, such as mountain biking and river sports.
The benefit to the rural community, he said at the Rural Tech Renaissance panel, is that “if you have remote workers working for 100 different companies you don’t worry about a big shutdown of a single employer.”
The idea of encouraging entrepreneurs to start businesses in smaller communities and attracting satellite offices to provide jobs for eager rural workers intrigued Epper and she started talking to Rowland about expanding the concept to Trinidad.
She arrived at the college in 2019 and went through the tough COVID years like everyone else. But Trinidad continued work to diversify the economy in the old mining town with a focus on arts and tourism that led to creation of an arts district, and in July 2020 the designation of Fishers Peak State Park.
“And yet, the jobs that come with those two industries are not necessarily family-sustaining jobs,” she said. “It’s a lot of service jobs.
“For a lot of the kids who grow up here there’s not a lot of opportunities. The biggest employers are the hospital and the college. We need to diversify and pay living wages.”
She applied for a state Opportunity Now grant through the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade to start an Emergent Campus in Trinidad. She didn’t get it in the first round, but the $3.5 million came through in the second phase and was awarded in March 2024.
The grants are aimed at connecting workers statewide with in-demand, high-paying occupations and focuses on collaboration and innovation — which is pretty much what TECHStart and Emergent Campus Florence have been doing for several years.
Even before the grant came through, Epper and Trinidad State College were rounding up support from the school district and community leaders to create Emergent Campus Trinidad.
The college leased a 7,000-square-foot wing of unused space on the Trinidad School District’s campus, which had been recently renovated so it was ready to move in. It opened in July 2024.
In January, the partnership of TSC, Pueblo Community College, Emergent Campus and others received a $5.75 million federal grant to develop career pathways in advanced manufacturing, such as robotics, automation and construction.
Epper said new and expanded courses in those areas will be offered on the community college campuses in Pueblo, Cañon City, Trinidad and Alamosa.
The courses will be taught in-person, but students from other areas can join remotely, which broadens the opportunities for students at the four campuses, she said.
Additionally, TSC just completed a nearly $10 million renovation of its library, adding a computer assisted design lab and a maker space filled with 3D printers of varying capabilities, sewing machines, a vinyl cutter and more. It is staffed by students who assist students or community members who use the space.
“We have places for students to study quietly and space for students to study loudly — to collaborate,” Epper said at a rural tech conference at the library last month. “We needed to inspire the workforce of tomorrow.”
The conference drew educators, students, businesses who work with Emergent Campus and grant experts for a day of brainstorming on ways to build a “collaborative ecosystem” and “economic resilience” among other topics.
Cañon City High School Principal Bill Summers shared how the school grew its internship program over seven years. Internships are a graduation requirement and the school pays every student $400 for completing an internship.
He reminded attendees: “It doesn’t have to be perfect to launch,” and encouraged others to get started and tweak programs as they move forward.
That’s what Christine Louden, executive director of Emergent Campus Trinidad, is doing. She’s knocked on businesses’ doors to recruit them to sponsor internships. Twenty-two have signed up. She’s already got nine students in internships and is trying to find a fit for others.
The campus has an after school cyber security game club and a robotics club with six members.
The spaces in the building are flexible and Louden works with tenants to meet their needs. Her own office is in a corner of a large, high-ceilinged classroom.
Zachary Stormant, a design engineer who owns Stormant Designs, has set up shop in the corner of another classroom, where he enjoys an expansive view of Trinidad. He works mostly with manufacturers of metal buildings and has lived in various places, including Boulder.
“I came to visit Trinidad and fell in love with it,” he said. He initially rented a small office and then moved into Emergent Campus. He enjoys the comradery and community aspect of working in a shared space. And his bicycle is parked next to his desk.
Louden understands the lure. She left a career in international marketing and management, including stints in London and Australia, to return to her hometown of Branson, where she is the mayor. Branson, population 57, is the southernmost town in Colorado and about 50 miles from Trinidad.
She loves her southern Colorado community, and she is convinced of the potential that Emergent Campus brings to the rural area and what working with Trinidad State College could mean. As she finishes a tour of the campus, she proudly points out the banner sign on the otherwise nondescript brick building.
She and Epper are passionate about bringing opportunities to young people in Las Animas and nearby counties.
“One of the things we want to do is overcome the perception that high tech is not for rural Colorado,” Epper said. “It’s still a challenge. But there are 15,000 cybersecurity jobs currently open, so we need to extend down the I-25 corridor, build interest, cultivate that talent.”