This is the third in a series of five reported briefs about Opportunity Now Colorado, a $92M competitive grant program that used federal pandemic recovery funds to invest in employer-led workforce partnerships across every county in the state. In each piece, Alison Griffin, principal consultant at FutureRise, profiles a model that emerged from the program, with analysis showing what other states could apply to their own industries and workforce needs. Read the first piece here, and the second here.
For a generation, the standard arc of a talented young person in rural America has been to leave the town they grew up in. Emergent Campus, a tech-and-workforce hub built inside a former high school in rural south-central Colorado, is testing the opposite path: bring the jobs to where young people already live, so they no longer have to leave.
In the first two years, through July 2026, the model produced 126 job placements across two small towns, Florence and Trinidad. Those jobs provided $7M in income for the workers and had $15 to $16M in annual economic impact, according to Emergent’s estimates. That’s quadruple the $3.5M Opportunity Now grant the hub was awarded from the state.
A Grant That Built a Team
Since 2022, Opportunity Now has invested $92M in federal pandemic-recovery funds across 116 grantees in all 64 of Colorado’s counties. It was built as a competition and called on employers to lead the work. For Emergent Campus, the $3.5M award was critical to building up its staff. For eight years, the group had largely been run by volunteers, and the grant allowed it to hire the full-time staff needed to work with more people—starting in high school and staying with them through their first job, additional education, promotions, and career changes.
“Out of those 126 people, between my team of four, one of us can tell you everything about that person,” says Brad Rowland, Emergent Campus’ CEO. “Probably their family history, where they worked before, what their personal goals are, their favorite color.”
Selling ‘Digital Trades’
The first task was translation. “High tech” does not land in communities where families watched the mines close and the factories leave, so Trinidad State College renamed the work “digital trades.”
“Digital trades is newer vernacular in communities such as Trinidad that have lived a century within the boom-and-bust resource extraction economy,” says Dustin Eicke, president of Trinidad State College. “The trades are different today, still inclusive of welding, nursing, and machining, while they have expanded to include cybersecurity, computer-aided drafting, and computer information systems. Expanding our community’s definition of the trades helps students to envision themselves in successful industries.”
The label has roots. A century ago the region’s miners and foresters made their own parts and tools, and Sentry Siren has built warning sirens in the region since 1905. The company still forges its own metal, but now also pairs its sirens with predictive storm software.
Betting On the Locals
Conventional rural economic development is a pitch deck of incentives aimed at outside companies. Emergent Campus bets on the people already there. “People are the greatest asset. How do we cultivate it so they can build sustainable rural wealth?” Rowland says.
The idea had a long runway and an unlikely architect. Rowland spent years in Silicon Valley tech before burning out and landing in rural Colorado. More than a decade ago, he and a group of local tech professionals joined with the Fremont Economic Development Corporation to form what became TechSTART, a support system for entrepreneurs and remote workers. The effort launched in 2016, out to prove a tech industry could exist in rural Fremont County.
It earned a state tech-sector designation in 2018 as South Central Tech, and about a year later helped make the county the first rural community in Colorado to win a P-TECH early-college grant. That same year, Rowland and a group of investors bought the shuttered Florence High School, a century-old building, and opened Emergent Campus. The Opportunity Now grant, in 2024, enabled a second site in Trinidad.
One Number to Call
Rowland’s longer-term vision is regional, bigger than any one campus. By Rowland’s math, rural Colorado holds 18% of the state’s people across 85% of its land, and he wants to turn that expanse into a talent source for the big employers clustered in its cities. With more staff, Rowland says Emergent Campus could reach far more of the 220K people living between its two anchor towns. His pitch to defense contractors: when you win a contract with 500 seats to fill, you make one call and draw trained candidates from a cluster of towns across the region at once. The employer does not care where workers live, only that they are ready.
“Workforce is the most expensive thing you have in your business, and the most strategic. If rural Colorado can play a part in that, it’s worth a seat at the table,” Rowland says.
At least one employer has seen it firsthand. Chris Koehn’s IT and accounting services company, Second-61, operates an office in Florence.
“There’s a misconception that companies have to be in a major metro area to find strong technical talent. Our experience with a rural office has shown the opposite,” Koehn says. “When you hire in rural communities, you gain access to talented people who are deeply rooted in where they live and want meaningful career opportunities without having to relocate. That translates into a committed workforce, stronger retention, and an office that becomes part of the community rather than simply operating in it.”
Proof It Works
In Rowland’s telling, the grant’s real product was proof. Funders and employers kept asking the same question: Can rural people really do these jobs? The record answers it.
Barn Owl Precision Agriculture, a farm-robotics startup with 16 employees in rural Colorado, won the 2026 “Emerging Tech Company of the Year” at the Colorado Technology Association APEX Awards. Emergent Campus credits the grant with helping the region win a roughly $5.8M U.S. Department of Labor award to expand training.
“So many funders want to help rural, underserved communities, but they don’t want to just throw money at something,” Rowland says. “We now have a proven model with data to support it. Put your money in, we’re going to show you the results.”
The demand for results is well founded, as the last big idea for reviving a left-behind economy did not work. A decade ago, a wave of “learn to code” programs set out to turn out-of-work coal miners into software developers. The Appalachian nonprofit Mined Minds ended in lawsuits and accusations of broken promises. The programs failed because they trained people in short bootcamps for jobs that didn’t exist where those people lived. Emergent runs the other way. It grows employers inside the community, so the jobs exist before anyone trains for them. And it doesn’t graduate a cohort and move on. The 126 people it counts as a success are in jobs, whether down the street or remotely. And Rowland’s model is to stay with people through their first job and the ones after.
The jobs also have to last. As automation reshapes entry-level work, including in cybersecurity, the question is whether these are careers people grow in or jobs that disappear as the work automates. Rowland believes that AI tools will help people who already know the work do more of it, and no one can use them well without learning the fundamentals first. He points to Justin Passero, a Marine Corps veteran he mentored, who went from his first tech job at Pax8, a Denver software company, to a sales engineer role at DefensX.
Some of that work starts well before a first job. Emergent Campus partners with C Cubed Training, an independent cybersecurity nonprofit led by John Freeburg, a former Army officer, and his wife, Marcy Freeburg. During the pandemic, they ran the only Spanish-language cybersecurity summer camp in the region, after watching students with no computer at home drive up to drop paperwork at closed schools. Pax8 named the organization its social-impact partner of the year and raised $20K for free camps. C Cubed has since reached more than 50 students across rural southern Colorado, Freeburg says, connecting with “young people who deserve to know that their dreams and potential matter.”
A Playbook for Other Places
The model is already spreading: an outpost is being planned in a third town and Colorado State University Pueblo wants to extend the pathway to a four-year degree. Joze Petrich, interim executive director of Emergent Campus’ Trinidad office, is wiring the location into the region’s advanced industries—serving as a convener for industry, education, entrepreneurs, public partners, and rural workers themselves. The industries opening up for the region now include defense, aerospace, and quantum. In particular, Emergent Campus is focused on building a pipeline for quantum, which is being built up through Elevate Quantum, a federally backed consortium positioning southern Colorado on a quantum corridor that runs into Wyoming and New Mexico.
“Trinidad doesn’t need to become the next Denver or Colorado Springs,” Petrich says. “We have an opportunity to create something distinct: a rural innovation hub where companies can connect, test, build, and grow.”