All over Boulder County, young people and their families walk, bike, drive, ride the bus, and use all kinds of creative transportation options to get everywhere they need to go. GUB steering committee member and consultant Darcy Kitching wants to know how you navigate your everyday trips to school, work and beyond. Darcy, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado Denver, is conducting a research study with the Boulder County Youth Transportation Program to learn what youth and caregivers need and want from our local transportation systems while testing new data-collection methods that may help the people who plan and construct streets, paths, trails, and transit networks to understand families better.

To help fund this community-engaged research that includes youth voices, GUB collaborated with Darcy on a Community Trust Civic Engagement grant from the Community Foundation Boulder County. The $3,000 grant, awarded in October, will support the participation of youth and adults from historically underrepresented communities in the research. Darcy and her research team are now coordinating sites for a series of in-person small-group interview sessions around the county to capture the experiences of families in different geographical areas. The sessions begin in Lyons in December and will be held in Boulder, Longmont, Nederland, Erie, Hygiene, Lafayette, and Louisville between January and April 2022. To learn more and to participate, go to the Boulder County School Travel Study website for details, or contact Darcy at darcy.kitching@ucdenver.edu.