Grow SECO is an initiative of Ogallala Commons (OC) for Southeast Colorado, by Southeast Coloradoans. It is forged from many projects that OC has conducted and partnered with in the region for the past decade. Grow SECO will expand our current youth engagement activities into a young adult network, Rural & Remote Initiative, rebuilding local food systems, and any outreach that can build more resilient communities by reinvigorating the 12 Key Assets of Commonwealth: education; health; leisure and recreation; history; sense of place; water cycle; arts and culture; wildlife and natural world; soil and mineral cycle; foodshed; renewable energy; and spirituality.

The circle logo for Grow SECO evokes a wagon wheel, sunrise on a new day, the change of seasons, and traveling the trail. For centuries and during all seasons, people have followed trails into Southeast Colorado to hunt, to trade, to gather sustenance, and then to settle and to build. Grow SECO aims to be the “hub of the wheel” that connects and interweaves all the collaborative work that OC and our partners in Southeast Colorado are doing together. Though our region has borne its share of hard times, we look to youth, adults, and elders to rise from the challenges and to take up the trail again—traveling the pathways, both old and new, that can lead us to a promising tomorrow.