Each year, the Summit Daily News team provides honest feedback to its leaders and sets goals for what it wants to achieve in the coming year. These aren’t financial goals — though we have those, too. They’re more about the way we operate our business, make our employees feel valued and support the community.

Our statement of values includes a commitment to “act as good-faith partners to community leaders and groups that aim to make our region a better place to live, work, play and visit,” and we feel we’re living up to that with one of our top goals for the year: Be more visible in the community.

As part of that effort, I want to let our readers know what we’re working on.

Volunteer work

A renewed commitment to volunteerism has energized the team, with many employees picking a cause they’re passionate about. Here is a sampling of what we’re working on:

• For the past two years, I’ve served as a member on the Strong Future Behavioral Health committee, which recommends funding requests that support mental health improvements in the community. Supporting mental health efforts has been a priority for me since my family was forever changed by a suicide loss in 2017.
• I’m also passionate about continuing education, so I’ve volunteered as a mentor for first-generation college students through the Colorado Mountain College Mountain Scholars program since 2020, when new college students needed more help than ever navigating through the pandemic.
• To help support community service projects, I’ve been a member of Rotary Club of Summit County since 2022. As a member, I’ve volunteered at any number of events, including community dinners, Adopt an Angel and more. You’ll find me cleaning up Colorado Highway 9 this weekend in partnership with the Breckenridge Mountain Rotary Club.
• For the past year, I’ve been involved with Communities That Care, a grant-funded effort through Youth and Family Services to ensure youths in our community are thriving and healthy by making them feel belonging and connectedness.
• I’ve also gotten involved in various ways through Summit School District, including with the Pathways project by presenting for students who are learning about different career paths, participating in a conversation on belonging during a recent School Board meeting, and attending scholarship night where Summit Daily awarded the annual Meg Boyer Memorial Scholarship in partnership with Rotary.

In addition, many folks on our team regularly walk dogs at the animal shelter, unload food trucks at the Family & Intercultural Resource Center and participate in community cleanup days (look for us next week at Keystone Mountain). Our sports reporter Cody Jones, an elite runner, works as a volunteer for the Summit Distance Project, and our new Circulation Director Lucas Bankson, a former Marine, delivered the invocation and benediction at the recent Memorial Day ceremony at Dillon Cemetery.

Community partnerships

In addition to our volunteer work, we’ve established a number of partnerships with community organizations to promote their objectives.

• We partner with Mountain Dreamers to produce a weekly Spanish-language newscast called La Voz de Summit. The project launched last year with start-up support from Summit Foundation as part of a mission to ensure Spanish speakers in our community have access to important local news. Contact me if you’d like to get involved with this project.
• In the spring, we partnered with CommonSpirit and other local nonprofits to produce the eighth annual Longevity Project, a public health reporting series that this year focused on traumatic brain injuries. Many readers reached out to let us know that the reporting and talks tied to the project helped them feel seen with an otherwise invisible injury.
• We’re also partnering with Summit County Libraries and Friends of the Summit County Libraries to digitize Summit County’s historic newspapers and make them available to the public for free — a project that will take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete.
• Our team sponsors many community events each year, with the Summit Chamber’s Business Excellence Awards among them. As part of our support of the local chamber, you’ll find Summit Daily door prizes at monthly mixers. We’ve also partnered with Frisco to sponsor its summer concert series, Elevated Community Health to support its annual Soup for the Soul fundraiser, and Friends of the Dillon Ranger District to promote its popular casino night.

You might have also seen Summit Daily staffers at the recent grad parade in Breckenridge, sporting award-winning homemade costumes at Brewski, and at our recently launched Community Conversations events, where folks can stop by, meet the Summit Daily team and talk about what’s on their minds.

After hosting events in Frisco and Breckenridge, our next meetup is from 4:30-6 p.m. June 25 at Red Mountain Grill in Dillon. Come say “hello,” chat about the news and learn more about what we’re doing to support our community.

Nicole Miller is the publisher and former editor of the Summit Daily News. You can reach her at nmiller@summitdaily.com or 970-668-4618.