The United Nations Association of Boulder County is excited to announce that nominations are now open for the 2026 Human Rights Awards. Beginning in 1996, the awards have celebrated the people of Colorado who work to honor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

September 29 is the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste—an opportunity to consider how the food we grow, buy, prepare, share, and sometimes discard connects to a much larger global system.

In a world where looking at the news feels like constant negativity, a positive story rarely reaches the headlines. Although it may feel surprising at times, people and organizations all over the world are working toward peace. 

Every fall, Boulder puts on its black and gold and comes home to itself. There are old friends, familiar streets, traditions carried forward, and the unmistakable feeling of returning to a place that remembers you. But around the world, home is becoming harder to hold onto. In Nepal, melting glaciers and increasingly dangerous floods are reshaping communities that have called the Himalayas home for generations. Here in Boulder, the Marshall Fire gave us our own glimpse of how quickly a place can change, and how long it can take to find a way back. This Homecoming, I’ve been thinking about what it means to protect not only the places we love, but the possibility of returning to them.

In the middle of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, streets suddenly end at barriers, buildings sit abandoned, and United Nations peacekeepers patrol a buffer zone dividing the city. Decades later, Cyprus still has no final political settlement, but it has avoided returning to widespread violence. This raises an important question: can a peacekeeping mission be considered successful if it keeps the peace without actually achieving peace?

Most advocacy starts with something you already have.

You care about something. You notice something that doesn’t sit right. You have an experience that changes how you see an issue. You see a gap between how something works and how it could work. Or you know someone whose experience has made that gap impossible to ignore.

Maybe you have a voice you’re willing to use, a connection you’re willing to share, or the persistent sense that surely we can do better than this.

For a long time, “advocate” was a fuzzy word to me. An advocate was someone who did something important or helped someone somehow. In corporate life, we “advocate for a position” or “advocate for an employee,” which usually meant making a case in a meeting and hoping PowerPoint would carry the day.

I didn’t think much about advocacy as a practice. Which is funny, because apparently I was already doing it.

Daryl Wallace argues that thorium molten-salt reactors and factory-built SMRs are different enough from conventional nuclear technology to require an entirely new regulatory framework, not just new permits under old rules. He contends their passive "safe-to-fail" design, waste-consuming fuel cycles, and standardized factory certification (unlike bespoke megaprojects such as Vogtle) address the core hazards nuclear law was built around — meltdown risk, waste accumulation, and one-off construction — making a purpose-built "Nuclear Age 2.0" licensing system both necessary and achievable.

There were blueberry muffins on paper napkins, juice boxes lined up in a row, and three children moving between wanting to sit close to me and wanting to find their friends. It was an ordinary school morning, the kind I know I will miss someday. And somewhere in the middle of it, surrounded by mothers and children, I began thinking about all the other ways a morning can begin. About mothers starting over after displacement, learning unfamiliar schools and unfamiliar streets. About mothers caring for children through illness, conflict, disaster, and loss. Our lives may look nothing alike, but the hope beneath them is remarkably familiar. We want our children to be safe. We want them to belong. We want someone to make room for them. I left Muffins with Mom thinking about how much of that hope depends on whether the rest of us are willing to make room, too.

Audrey Patton: Bhutan's first-ever Conscious Food Systems Summit, held August 31 to September 4, 2026. The summit brought together world leaders, UN officials, farmers, and wellness experts to explore how values and mindset — rather than just policy mechanics — can address the global hunger and climate crisis. Over five days, the event moved from confronting the scale of the food crisis, to mapping a multi-year Conscious Food Systems Framework, to showcasing Bhutan itself as a "living laboratory" shaped by its Gross National Happiness philosophy, and finally closing with traditional Bhutanese rituals symbolizing renewal and collective action. The article frames Bhutan's slower, values-driven approach to food and agriculture as a potential model for the rest of the world as climate change and resource scarcity intensify.

Nearly one million Brazilian children and adolescents were out of school in 2024, including indigenous and low-income youth disproportionately affected. While educational inequality remains a significant challenge in Brazil, communities in Colorado are working to address and help solve this issue. Through the Colorado chapter of Partners of the Americas, Colorado residents can support educational partnerships that provide professional development for Brazilian teachers and help strengthen the opportunities for youth.

This article argues that investors in ESG, SDG, and global-development technology need to rethink how they assess frontier-tech ventures. Rather than avoiding capital-intensive hardware, spatial AI, and technologies operating in challenging markets, investors can identify opportunities where startups have already reduced risk through partnerships with corporations and research institutions, strong local knowledge, resilient edge-based technology, and data-sovereign architectures. Using Colorado’s innovation ecosystem as an example, the article presents practical due-diligence signals for evaluating capital efficiency, operational resilience, and scalability—and makes the case that the next generation of high-impact, venture-scale returns will come from technologies designed to succeed in the real world, not just the cloud.

Ghana, despite abundant natural resources, remains economically disadvantaged due to colonial-era extraction patterns. As the world's second-largest cocoa producer, Ghana exports raw beans rather than processed chocolate, leaving most value captured abroad while up to 90% of local farmers earn below a living income. COCOBOD's monopoly control over pricing hasn't solved this. Dependency theory explains the pattern: Global South nations export raw materials, then reimport finished goods, generating profit for the North. Ghana is countering this through economic nationalism, diversifying into oil, partnering with Côte d'Ivoire via CIGCI for fairer cocoa prices, and supporting domestic chocolate producers like Niche.

Nepal is facing its deadliest natural disaster since the 2015 earthquake, with flooding and landslides killing more than 900 people and leaving thousands missing. As rescue teams struggle to reach isolated communities, the United Nations is supporting the Government of Nepal through emergency food, healthcare, clean water and sanitation, nutrition, child protection and humanitarian coordination. WFP, UNICEF, WHO, OCHA and other UN agencies are working to reach the most vulnerable—including children, pregnant women and displaced families—while warning that the disaster highlights the growing risks that climate change and melting glaciers pose to Nepal’s mountain communities.

Step Into the Room Where Food and War Meet brings participants into an immersive, intergenerational Model United Nations simulation focused on the future of Black Sea grain exports and global food security. On January 23, 2027, high-school students, university students, seniors, and community members will represent countries and international institutions—including Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, China, the United Nations, and the World Food Programme—and negotiate a new framework for moving food through a conflict zone. With a floor-sized Black Sea map, shuttle diplomacy, a live newsroom, and unexpected crisis scenarios, delegates will confront real-world challenges including de-mining, inspections, war-risk insurance, sanctions, grain origins, and famine risk. By the end of the morning, participants will have experienced the pressures of international diplomacy firsthand and worked to produce—and potentially secure agreement on—a Black Sea Grain Framework 2027.

The presentation given before an inter-faith audience for the UN International Day of Peace held August 29th 2026 by the Brahma Kumaris in Denver.

In an interview conducted by George Lucky Okello, AI Solutions Architect Matija Vidmar delivers a pragmatic analysis of artificial intelligence's potential and risks across developing nations, with a sharp focus on Africa. Vidmar argues that while AI can extend scarce local expertise in critical sectors like healthcare and agriculture, its impact is often modest rather than revolutionary, as demonstrated by maternal health initiatives in Kenya. He highlights the existential threat AI poses to traditional economic development by automating entry-level outsourcing jobs—a vital ladder for young, female workers—while urging African firms to build defensible value by leveraging unique local data and niche technical capabilities rather than competing on low labor costs. Ultimately, Vidmar contends that Africa's strategic challenge is not merely accessing AI but owning it, warning that without aggressive policy choices and investments to address severe infrastructure deficits in power, connectivity, and data center capacity, AI risks widening existing global economic gaps rather than narrowing them.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to travel through Africa, Asia, and Europe. Being there completely changed the way I look at foreign aid. Before traveling, it was easy to hear millions or billions of dollars being discussed and see it as another government expense. After being there, I don't see it that way anymore.

I saw communities where access to healthcare, clean water, food, and other basic resources is not something everyone can count on. I met people, talked to families, and saw firsthand that decisions being made thousands of miles away have very real consequences for people on the ground. That is why cuts to foreign aid matter.