Spotlight on: Urban Hens

Last year, Wynn Martens and Jeanne McDonald, Outreach Coordinators at the CU Office of Community Education, started to get depressed while they were putting together a community lecture series about climate change. 

"We realized we needed to make it more applicable to get people interested," said McDonald.  "the only people who were coming already knew about it."

They decided they needed to find more interactive, applicable ways to educate the community about sustainability.

So, in connection with the CU school of Architecture and Planning, they got a grant from the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation to start Urban Hens, a program to bring backyard chickens in to local neighborhoods and communities.

The goal of the program, according to Martens, is to create practical, local, hands-on solutions to climate change. 

"Having chickens is a closed loop system," she said.  "People can learn about that on a small scale and then apply in on a larger scale."

Two chicken coops were installed this summer, one in a community garden in North Boulder and one at Shawnee Gardens, an assisted living home in South Boulder.  At Shawnee Gardens residents of the home and kids from the Blossom preschool next door care for the chickens together. 

Students from an environmental design class built and designed the coops.  Now they are working to design kits for smaller, single
family coops to sell.  Profits from the kits will go towards installing more large community coops.

"We're trying to make it easy to build sustainable communities," said Martens.