January and February have a way of clarifying things. 

December invites us to be visionaries, imagining what could be. Then the calendar turns. January brings us back to reality. The work that felt abstract at the end of the year suddenly asks for our attention again. 

This month, as we welcome a new class of Colorado Governors Fellows and begin another year of Purpose Hours, we find ourselves returning to a question that sits at the heart of CiviCO’s work: 

What does it actually look like to participate in community change in meaningful ways? 

Not to show up once.
Not to weigh in from a distance.
Not to advocate for people without being accountable to them. 

But to stay engaged long enough, and deeply enough, to make progress on challenges that resist easy solutions. 

For this year’s cohort of Colorado Governors Fellows, we’re sharing a Field Guide for their sessions. We want to help them name something many leaders feel intuitively but rarely say out loud: most of the challenges shaping life in Colorado today are not technical problems with known solutions; they are adaptive challenges. 

Adaptive challenges require learning. They require people to change. They involve loss, tradeoffs, and tension. And they cannot be solved by authority, expertise, or efficiency alone. 

Participation sits squarely in that category. 

We often talk about “community engagement” as if it were a box to check or a strategy to deploy. But participation that leads to progress asks something more demanding of all of us. It asks us to slow down, share power, sit with discomfort, and involve people who are often excluded not just as voices, but as co-creators. 

That is not easy work. And it is not work we are naturally rewarded for. 

Each year, when a new Colorado Governors Fellowship cohort begins, we make three clear promises.

1. We promise civic education that helps leaders understand how systems work, how decisions are made, and how power and authority shape what is possible.
2. We promise civic experience that brings leaders into proximity with communities, places, and lived realities across Colorado, because experience complicates easy narratives in ways data alone cannot. And,
3. We promise civic leadership that builds the capacity to mobilize yourself and others to make progress on shared challenges, especially when the work becomes uncomfortable and the way forward is unclear. 

This year’s cohort includes 40 accomplished leaders from across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. Each arrives with deep expertise in their own field and a shared commitment to finding a civic pathway to help make Colorado a better place. 

These promises are not linear steps. They are a cycle leaders move through again and again. Learning. Experiencing. Acting. Reflecting. Adjusting. 

Purpose Hours are one of the places where that cycle comes to life. It’s where we introduce anyone who wants to join us to the complexity of the challenges and opportunities facing Colorado across its sectors, communities and regions.  

On February 5, we’ll gather for our next Purpose Hour, focused on reimagining participation in community change. This conversation is grounded in a real example of what it looks like to build solutions with communities, not for them. We’ll hear from leaders connected to Elevated Denver’s Collaboratory, a cross-sector effort that brought together people with lived experience of homelessness, nonprofit leaders, and other stakeholders to co-create systemic solutions. 

This is not a story about finding “the fix.” It is a story about choosing a different process. 

A process that asks who belongs at the table. How lived expertise can be honored without being tokenized. What meaningful inclusion looks like when people bring different levels of power, time, and capacity. How truth-telling and co-creation can be invited without overburdening those we are asking to participate. 

These are adaptive questions. There are no universal answers. But there are lessons worth learning together. 

One of the hardest truths about participation is that it requires those with authority to give something up: time, control, certainty, the illusion of efficiency. Because in community level work leadership is an activity, not a role or a title. Leadership shows up when people choose to take responsibility for progress, even when it violates expectations. Often, that means resisting the pull toward quick fixes and instead creating space for productive tension. 

The Elevated Denver Collaboratory offers a living example of this. It centers lived expertise not as an add-on, but as a core ingredient. It treats participation not as extraction—“tell us your story so we can design something better”—but as shared responsibility for shaping what comes next. 

That approach surfaces real tensions. It takes longer. It requires trust-building. It forces hard conversations about power, compensation, boundaries, and accountability. And it is precisely because of that difficulty that it holds so much promise. 

We often say that civic leadership cannot be outsourced upward. No single institution, sector, or leader can solve the challenges we face. Progress depends on whether people who share a problem are willing to take responsibility together. 

Purpose Hours are not classrooms in the traditional sense. They are practice spaces. Places to listen across difference. Places to wrestle with questions that do not resolve neatly. Places to see how others are experimenting with new ways of working. 

For our Fellows, these gatherings reinforce the commitments we ask them to make in the Fellowship: to stay curious longer than is comfortable, to hold tension without rushing to resolution, and to remain engaged when withdrawal would be easier. For the broader CiviCO community, they are an invitation into civic ownership, not just to learn about an issue, but to reflect on how participation shows up, or does not, in your own work, organization, or community. 

As the Governors Fellowship kicks off and we look ahead to another year of Purpose Hours, we are reminded that leadership development is not about accumulating answers. It is about building capacity. Capacity to diagnose before acting. Capacity to engage others rather than go it alone. Capacity to choose purpose over comfort when the work gets hard. 

The February Purpose Hour is one small but meaningful example of what that looks like in practice. 

If you care about community change. If you are wrestling with how to engage people more meaningfully. If you are curious about what participation requires when it is done well, come be part of the conversation. 

Not as an observer. 
Not as an expert. 
But as someone willing to stay engaged long enough to make progress. 

That is the work. And it belongs to all of us.