The Family Learning Center

The Family Learning Center is one of Boulder’s most valuable and least known service organizations.  Founded by Brenda Lyle 34 years ago, FLC has provided 14,000 of Boulder County’s low-income, culturally diverse children and families with lifelong learning tools for self-sufficiency and success.  We teamed up with Blue Spruce Construction to provide probono  services for FLC’s new Health and Wellness Education Center.  This essential space will enable them to provide expanded early childhood physical fitness classrooms, space for food preservation (canning food from their community garden), distributing donated organic food, clothing, and for a variety of wellness education programs.  We are in the middle of construction and FLC is fundraising to complete the interiors.  Please consider helping this extremely worthwhile group today with  a tax-deducible contribution.

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Top Green Materials and Practices

Here is an article featuring our Principal, Scott, as he discusses green building. Material selections and initial steps of design are just as important as dealing with site waste disposal months later. Take a look at these 11 steps of utilizing green materials and practices that we think are worth prioritizing. 

Re-building after the Flood

Home and Hood Magazine - Rebuilding after the flood. Huy Lam dug his shovel into the deep sand and continued to excavate the buried play-structure in what used to be his family’s back yard. Twenty feet away, the creek that used to be on one side of the house now flowed swiftly down the other. When the stream moved, it dumped hundreds of tons of sand and rock all over his property and it tore away a good chunk of the house.

“I’m not sure what comes next. It all depends on what the County decides to do with the creek”, Huy said between shovels.

For six months from the time of the flood, the County is allowing flood victims to bypass the daunting Site Plan Review process (as long as the re-constructed house is the same size as the original), but all new construction must still meet all local building codes. The green building codes are some of the most rigorous in the Country, and many of the older homes that were damaged will require a substantial upgrade to their envelope and mechanical systems in order to meet them.

The Lams have a long way to go before they can get back into their home: County reviews; navigating insurance and mortgage requirements; figuring out how to best rebuild with the insurance settlement; getting a building permit; re-building the house; moving back in; and perhaps most important of all, repairing the land that made them want to live in this beautiful, but (every 500 years) dangerous place in the first place.

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We are currently assisting them to reconstruct their home to begin living after the flood.