Christine Louden hails from Branson, Colorado, a tiny town 50 miles east of Trinidad. But she has left her footprint in places as far away as Southeast Asia and Australia.
A fourth-generation Coloradan, Louden has returned to her roots, moving her family back to the U.S. in 2018. With a background in marketing, design, entrepreneurship and leadership consulting, she brings an international business perspective to her newest venture — launching the Emergent Campus Trinidad as its executive director.
“What drew me was the chance to shape this area going forward for our kids, and to create some new economic opportunities here,” says Louden, who took on the role in mid-July 2024.
Like its parent, the Emergent Campus in Florence, the Trinidad campus is envisioned as an innovation hub for businesses, drawing new employers and creating educational pathways, internships and well-paying jobs.
“We are leveraging 24 existing Southern Colorado employers on the Emergent campus in Florence and providing additional internship pathways,” Louden says. “We’re building a workforce partnership with Fremont [County], Pueblo and Trinidad to triangulate in order to draw more tech business down from the Front Range.”
Like the original Emergent Campus, which is housed in a former school building, the Trinidad campus is located in what used to be the Park Street School. Across the street from Trinidad State College, Park Street, originally an elementary school, sat vacant for years.
Several years ago, the Trinidad school district won a Colorado BEST (Building Excellent Schools Today) grant and used some of the funds to renovate the Park Street School to move-in-ready condition. But it remained unoccupied until the partners looking to create the Emergent Campus saw it as an ideal site and partnered with the district to rent it.
Within the building, seven office spaces have been created with new flooring, windows and climate control, projection capabilities and high-speed fiber internet, Louden says. One is a coworking space that already has three members. The Trinidad State College campus is providing additional facilities, including a makerspace, training rooms and collaboration and co-working spaces for the campus’s tenants, remote workers and students.
Although the emphasis will be creating a tech industry base, Louden says tech-adjacent and advanced manufacturing companies are welcome, as well as web designers, digital marketers and e-commerce providers.
“Ultimately, we’d like to bring light manufacturing here,” she says. “But while there is space on the Emergent Campus, we are going to support any business that is looking for growth and support.”
Discussions about expanding the Emergent concept to Trinidad began about two years ago, says Brad Rowland, general manager of the Florence Emergent Campus. At that time, the Florence campus, which grew out of the Fremont Economic Development Corporation’s TechSTART program, was garnering recognition as a tech hub and generating new jobs in the county.
Although Trinidad had a thriving arts scene and a beautiful downtown with numerous well-preserved historic buildings, it had relied on traditional industries such as agriculture, gas production and coal mining, which were in decline.
Business and education leaders from Trinidad approached the Emergent Campus about replicating the Florence campus’s success. Together, they built a team that included the Trinidad School District; BOCES, an educational nonprofit; and Trinidad State College. The coalition applied for and won a $3.5 million Colorado Opportunity Now grant to develop and sustain the Trinidad campus for 27 months.
The educational partners are essential to the project to create the job pathways that will train students and workers from Trinidad and seven adjacent counties to fill well-paying tech jobs.
“We are trying to build a workforce partnership and education network with Fremont, Pueblo and Trinidad,” Louden says. “We are taking the approach of banding together and dividing and conquering.”
Louden spends much of her time assembling those networks, reaching out to lending partners, business incubators, workforce development partners and schools from Pueblo to Walsenburg.
“Ultimately, I want to activate Colfax County in northern New Mexico,” she says.
In the next 12 months, Louden hopes to enlist up to 20 co-workers and to house four businesses with two to four employees each.
“We could easily have seven businesses here and some that have outgrown us. And I hope that, by year five, we’re starting to see some activity spill out of the Emergent Campus into the city and the region. Then I’ll feel like we’ve fulfilled our mission.”
