A group of high school students crowd around a long table at The Drop teen center in Frisco eating Chinese food, talking about college applications and laughing loudly at each other's jokes.
They are gathered for their bi-monthly Youth Empowerment Society meeting. A representative from Summit County’s planning department joined to ask the teens what would make their community better.
A few piped up: more housing, better transportation, higher paying jobs for teens.
Get top headlines and KUNC reporting directly to your mailbox each week when you subscribe to In The NoCo.
“Libraries and parks,” said Yareli Baños Ruiz, a 16-year old student at Summit High School. “Because, like a lot of people who live in Dillon, they don't really have a hangout space, so they gotta go all the way to Silverthorne or Frisco or Breckenridge.”
Others asked for more indoor spaces as well: teen-focused shops, a Trader Joe’s, a new recreation center.
“Just a really big thing for me is places for like kids to be that aren't, like, sports and they aren't, like, a job,” said James Rivera, another 16-year-old student from Summit High School. “You either go to the rec center, or you go skate and skiing in the winter. But that's about it.”
Summit County’s planning department is gathering information from the community to create a guide for the community's future. "Blueprint Summit" will be the first new planning and zoning document of its kind for Summit County in 15 years.
In conversations like this one with the Youth Empowerment Society and several others with school-aged kids in Summit, the need for more hangout spots, especially in indoor spaces, is surfacing as a major issue. Students are thinking big, suggesting everything from a new arcade to indoor soccer fields to restaurants that are affordable and open late enough.
“I feel like in the winter, there's not much to do aside from, like, sitting at home and doing nothing,” Baños Ruiz said.
'A collective activity'
These teens are alluding to the need for so-called "third spaces," places young people can go outside of home and school or, for adults, outside of home and work.
“It might be a coffee shop, where folks can meet up and have a chat around a particular book they might be reading, or it could be a bowling alley, right, where you join a league,” said Heather Kennedy, a professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. “It's a collective activity where multiple people are all engaging at once, not always from the same household.”
Research published in the journal Health Place suggests many types of third spaces across the U.S. closed between 2008 and 2015, following the Great Recession.
“The relevance of third places to health and quality life is under-researched,” the study's authors wrote. “These sites may support wellbeing through mechanisms of stimulation, support, protection, and care. We call on researchers to investigate how third places contribute to wellbeing and consider the consequences that the disappearance of such places has for public health.”
Kennedy explained third spaces can be even more important for kids from lower-income families.
“Their families may struggle to put food on the table, who have to work multiple jobs, may not have the same access to supportive non-parental adults and spaces of support, particularly after school hours,” Kennedy said.
This need exists across the state, in rural, suburban and urban areas. Last summer, the city of Fort Collins opened a 1,500-square-foot teen center, a project young people and public health experts had pushed for years.
Last summer, in Denver, education activist Brandon Pryor spoke about this issue at a youth wellness event oriented toward the Black community. When there’s nothing for kids to do in their own neighborhoods, they can easily get lost, he explained.
“What kind of commerce can we bring to our communities that would be for the kids? Somewhere for them to exist and let their hair down, so to speak. They need that,” Pryor said.
Reconnecting with peers
For kids across the state, having access to third spaces is about having places to connect that, in turn, help guard against loneliness and isolation. In recent years, Colorado kids have struggled with their mental health. In 2021, just over half of teens said they usually have a friend to talk to about their feelings.
“We're coming out of COVID. Now more than ever, youth need to reconnect with their peers. And we know how important that is developmentally,” Elizabeth Edgar, the youth and family services department manager for Summit County, said.
The department works with community partners to offer events like movie nights and game nights. But for teens without cars, getting to places where they can hang out can be tough, especially in mountain communities like Summit County.
“You might be on a bus for an hour to get to where you're trying to get, and if you need to connect, that can be tricky,” Edgar said. “If it's snowing and really cold and dark out, it also makes it tricky to get around the county.”
Summit County’s new "Blueprint Summit," set to be finalized later this year, is intended as a strategic vision for the future of the county and will ultimately land with the Summit County Board of County Commissioners as a tool to guide decision-making around planning and zoning.
Commissioner Tamara Pogue said just as with child care and after school programming, the need for third spaces has been a perennial issue.
“We know we have many kids in this community that go home after school to an empty house, or an empty condo, and sort of sit there until their parents can come home,” Pogue said.
Building new spaces is expensive, but Pogue said the county is making improvement plans with young people in mind. The North Branch Library in Silverthorne, for example, reopened last month with a dedicated space for teens.
Pogue said creating accessible places for youth can feel like a bit of an afterthought amid other local concerns.
“There's just this assumption that there are so many beautiful places to recreate that we don't need to build these special or different spaces in some way,” said Pogue.
But investing in youth well-being is crucial.
"The youth are telling us they're not sure how they can stay here, and that there are things that really are going to need to change," she said. "They want to invest in our community."
