Faculty Cultivate Community with New Farmers Market

When Colorado Academy Upper School Librarian Allie Bronston and her husband, Corey Sampson, an Assistant Principal at Mullen High School, bought their home in Denver’s Harvey Park neighborhood—a quiet, mid-century enclave in the far southwest corner of the city—they were thrilled with nearly everything they discovered about this unique area, an urban/suburban hybrid only a few minutes from the CA campus. 

Comprising little more than farmhouses and pastures as late as 1945, this part of Southwest Denver only began experiencing growth of any kind after the end of World War II, as returning soldiers and their young families came to the area clamoring for affordable homes. Harvey Park, part of a large building spree in Denver during the 1940s and 1950s, drew these newcomers with its tidy single-family homes in the modern style made famous by Cliff May, its walkable neighborhoods, the local churches and schools, and all the economic and social opportunities available to the residents of one of Denver’s sparkling near suburbs.

 

As the city’s boundaries expanded and its demographics shifted dramatically throughout the 1970s and 80s, Harvey Park saw many of its original residents move farther afield, while Denver’s growing population of Latine families began to gravitate to the neighborhood for its relatively affordable living. Commercial areas and denser housing arrived more recently to serve what has since become a bustling, majority-Latine community with a significant Vietnamese immigrant population, as well.

Today, the area just to the northeast of Colorado Academy reflects all the diversity of its 80 years of history—one of its main attractions to families such as Bronston’s, who now, a decade and three babies later, call this vibrant neighborhood home. 

But they, like other residents, have long felt that one thing was missing from their cherished corner of Denver: a source for locally-produced food and groceries. “We have always loved local food and cared about it and sought it out,” says Bronston, “but it turns out Southwest Denver is almost a food desert in that respect.” The family would trek over a half hour each way to the popular City Park Farmers Market on weekends—when trying to find parking ate up another good chunk of their morning—to buy produce, baked goods, and other products from purveyors based in and around Denver.

 

So, she continues, starting with more than a year of careful relationship-building among highly-regarded providers from the region, they built their own destination for local food, in the parking lot of Denver Public Schools’ Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy right in the heart of the neighborhood. Featuring handcrafted goods from more than 50 local farmers and ranchers, specialty food purveyors, and ready-to-eat food vendors, the Harvey Park Farmers Market in its first season has become a magnet for families, students, elders, and anyone else able to walk, wheel, or drive there on a Saturday morning from May through October.

 

“The goal was always to create a real grocery hub for people in Southwest Denver as an alternative to the big-box chains,” Bronston explains, “and to lift up businesses here to give them a place to sell to consumers at an advantage over wholesale. We built something in our neighborhood that we didn’t have, but we knew everyone would want.”

Community connections

The list of hyper-local vendors—which includes names like Harvey Park Flowers; Rebel Farms, a hydroponic grower of leafy greens located less than a mile from the market; and Migas Coffee, whose owner grew up in Southwest Denver—brings nearby residents streaming out of their homes every Saturday morning, families on bikes or with young children in strollers making their way to the market for fresh croissants, hand-squeezed lemonade, Salvadoran pupusas, live music, and much more. 

 

The immediate success of the market has attracted buzz in the local press, as well as plenty of regulars from beyond the immediate neighborhood, including many CA faculty and staff members who live near the school. 

 

One CA customer, Service Learning Coordinator and REDI Lab Facilitator Jazmin Nieto, is no ordinary fan: After Bronston learned she was born and raised in Southwest Denver, she asked Nieto to step in as the market’s first Saturday employee when it opened in May 2026. With her lifelong history in the area, Nieto maintains a web of local connections from business owners to nonprofit organizers to Denver City Council members, bringing a wealth of knowledge and expertise to benefit both the market and its customers, along with her Upper School students at CA. And as a native Spanish speaker, she is able to facilitate community-building among the many different populations that intersect in Harvey Park.

 

“I grew up playing softball at the Harvey Park Rec Center,” she says, “so I feel like I’m in my own community here. Families and businesses are still very much representative of the Latin American and Vietnamese immigrant history in the area—Southwest Denver is very much holding on to those roots.”

 

Nieto has been instrumental in driving forward a key piece of the market’s mission—food access and benefit education for low-income families. She helps customers use their EBT cards for the federal government’s SNAP program, allowing them to purchase high-quality produce and other products at fair prices, as well as take advantage of an additional allowance that comes from a statewide grant.

 

But she explains that the Harvey Park Farmers Market has come to serve as an invaluable “third space” for many, regardless of income. 

Neither home nor work, the concept of the third space is increasingly seen as critical for democracy, civic engagement, and overall well-being. “Yes, it’s a place where people can do their grocery shopping,” Nieto explains, “but it is also a space to just hang out and be with other community members—bumping into neighbors, sharing stories, setting up a picnic, and listening to music.”

 

The power of the Harvey Park Farmers Market to bring together people and stories from all across the region is, in fact, something Nieto, alongside Director Jake Dresden, has woven into the curriculum in CA’s REDI Lab program. REDI Lab—Research, Entrepreneurship, Design, and Inquiry—adopts the lens of real-world systems, and equips students with the mindset and tools to identify community-rooted challenges and design meaningful, purpose-driven solutions. A recent guest speaker, Trần Nguyen-Wills, the Deputy Outreach Director with the Denver Mayor’s Office, spoke to REDI Lab students about local challenges she is addressing in her campaign to represent Denver City Council District 2—the area that includes Harvey Park and where Trần Nguyen-Wills, like Nieto, grew up.

 

“Opportunities for people to get to know each other across languages, cultures, and neighborhoods is something that I think we’re really missing in the world right now,” continues Nieto. “CA is a neighbor too; it’s a wonderful opportunity for students and for the school.”

Nurturing resilience

Those connections will likely continue to deepen as Bronston makes good on ambitious plans to expand the Harvey Park destination in the coming years. Cooking and canning classes are on the schedule for this fall, more ways to showcase local artists and musicians are on the list for next year, and creative partnerships with community businesses and nonprofits are continually in the works.

 

One of those partnerships, with the Denver food sovereignty organization Commún, has already resulted in a vendor incubation grant to support a female entrepreneur as she got her business at the market—serving Veracruzan specialties such as churros, aguas frescas, and tlayudas—off the ground. Eventually, the collaboration could lead to more, such as a local voucher program to support families whose SNAP benefits are under threat.

 

Working with local nonprofits like Commún—which is focused on giving community members the power to choose, access, and control their own culturally appropriate and locally grown food—benefits everyone, says Bronston.

 

“We hear those national conversations about beef prices or lettuce contamination, and we almost have to laugh,” she explains. “If you have a resilient food system, if you’ve already elevated known, local suppliers, then when national and international systems seem to be falling apart, farmers markets are well established as the food source people can trust.”

 

Nieto adds, “The reception in the community has been so sweet—I’ve actually seen people with tears in their eyes. They say things like, ‘We’ve never had this, but we deserve this,’ which is totally true.”