Corn Festival

Corn Festival

Poster promoting the event 'Harvest of All First Nations,' Second Annual Corn Festival on September 23rd and 24th at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado.
Colorful illustration of landmasses with Indigenous culture, wildlife, and landscapes, including a turtle, jaguar, eagle, traditional dancers, a teepee, a mountain with a water feature, and a campfire, representing Indigenous heritage and natural environment.
A smiling woman in a sunhat standing in a cornfield with green tall corn stalks and a clear blue sky, promoting a maize festival with the text in Spanish asking if the viewer attended the maize festival and inviting them to share comments and anecdotes.
A person's hand holding green tomatillos and a red chili pepper with orange marigold flowers in the background, on the ground covered with dry leaves and grass.

DEMOGRAPHIC OVERVIEW: 

A bar chart comparing various Indigenous and racial groups, showing the number of responses for each group, with 'Mixed Lineage with Indigenous' and 'Native American' having the highest counts. A pie chart above shows the responses to whether respondents are bilingual, with nearly equal responses for yes and no.

Insights:  

  • Having Bilingual support with our vendors will be tremendously important in 2024.  

  • In the write-in section of demographics, we collected data like: Mexicana, Mixed Indigenous of the Hopi Nation and Chicana, and Syrian. Identity is beautiful and complex.  

  • 43% of our vendors were based in Denver. HAFN’s outreach and presence at Denver events is extremely important.  

  • We didn’t have many attendees of the event from Denver, so perhaps having vendors do more supportive marketing campaigns in 2024 would draw a larger crowd from the city to our festival.

Bar graph titled 'Corn Festival Attendee Demographics' showing the 2023 demographic overview. The categories are White, Multiracial, Indigenous, LatinX, Black, Chicano, and Asian, with White having the highest percentage and Asian the lowest.

  • We had a well-versed range of panelists and community leaders support our event.  The programming was well attended and supportive in sharing HAFN’s work, as well as the work of BIPOC+ leaders in our regional community.  

  • Our community member, Devon Pena drove all the way from Southern Colorado to support our panel on sustainable models of water usage in agriculture.  

  • Our programming was impactful and the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.  

Pie chart showing corn festival attendee gender demographics with 54.1% female, 40.5% male, and 5.4% non-binary, against a background of colorful, textured corn cobs.

  • We gathered a lot of unique data that we wouldn’t have captured if we did a straightforward data survey with options.

  • Our community is beautiful, diverse, powerful, and spans widely across cultures and communities. It is powerful to bring a group of people together in the way that the Corn Festival does.

  • This data capture is not all encompassing but incredibly moving to see.

  • Historically marginalized groups often feel uncomfortable sharing demographic information in this manner. A larger conversation about community support around these questions could be productive for future demographic collection.

  • We sold 153 tickets to community members in Boulder County!

Flyer for the second annual Del Maiz festival, taking place September 23-24 at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado. Features corn imagery, event details, and list of performers including Rocky Mountain Indigenous Dancers, Pink Hawk
Flyer promoting the second annual harvest of all first nations corn festival on September 23rd and 24th at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado, from 12 PM to 7 PM, featuring indigenous dancers, music groups, and cultural activities
Event schedule with various activities and times: opening doors at 11:00 AM, water ceremony at 12:00 PM, opening intro at 1:15 PM, different circles and workshops from 2:00 PM to 7:30 PM, including Indigenous Wisdom, Nixtamal Workshop, Land and Cultu
Event schedule poster with activities and timings, including dance, workshops, and cultural presentations, divided into color-coded sections for different time slots and themes.
Event schedule poster in Spanish with activities and times, including open doors at 11:00 AM, water ceremony at noon, opening intro at 1:15 PM, and various workshops and performances in the afternoon, featuring indigenous groups and local organizatio
Event program schedule with activities and times, including open doors at 11:00 AM, dance at 12:00 PM, poetry and discourse at 1:00 PM, and various discussion circles from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM, with workshops and performances related to indigenous cult
Poster titled 'Second Annual Corn Festival Headliners' at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado. Features six photos of different dance groups and performers: The Pink Hawks, MonoVerde Collective, Mi Chantli Dancers, Los Mocochetes,

Poster titled 'Second Annual Corn Festival Headliners' at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado. Features six photos of different dance groups and performers: The Pink Hawks, MonoVerde Collective, Mi Chantli Dancers, Los Mocochetes, Rocky Mountain Indigenous Dancers, and Jackie Bird Hoop Dancer.

Discover our panelists

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Poster for the Second Annual Corn Festival Panelists at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado, featuring portraits and names of eight individuals.

Poster for the Second Annual Corn Festival Panelists at the Agricultural Heritage Center in Longmont, Colorado, featuring portraits and names of eight individuals.

Our 2023 Sponsors

Logo for 'Growing Gardens' featuring icons of a sun, a seedling, a watering can, and a bird, with the slogan 'cultivating community through urban agriculture'.
Logo for Longmont Community Foundation featuring stylized mountains, sun, and landscape with the organization name.
Illustration of mountains with a setting sun, pine trees, and the text 'Climate Justice Collaborative of Boulder County'.
Colorado Secure Savings logo with a bowl of coins and a dollar sign.
Seal of the Treasurers Office, State of Colorado, featuring a shield, tools, and inscriptions
Logo of The Colorado Trust featuring a stylized mountain design and text.
Logo of The Colorado Health Foundation featuring a blue and green abstract flower and black text.
Logo for Boulder County Parks & Open Space Foundation featuring mountains, a flying bird, and grass with text in brown and blue.
A circular pattern of stylized human figures in two colors, purple and tan, forming a spiral. Below the pattern, the word 'AMISTAD' is written in large purple letters, and underneath it is the phrase 'POR EL BIENESTAR Y LA EDUCACIÓN' in smaller tan l
Logo for Boulder Food Rescue featuring a bicycle and bold text with the website BoulderFoodRescue.org
Logo of Boulder County featuring mountain range and trees, with text 'Boulder County' and 'Sustainability, Climate Action & Resilience'.
A black-and-white line drawing of a scribbled, abstract shape with the phrase "I'm loved & found" written around the top and left side.
Event or presentation slide titled "FloWs: Foundations for Leaders Organizing for Water and Sustainability" on a blue background with radiating light rays.
A logo in the shape of a diamond with a gray background, black, red, and white border, featuring a fierce dragon head in the center, and sports team name 'Rebelle' with the text 'Est. 2019' and 'St. Louis' around it.
Logo of the National Philanthropic Trust featuring a blue circle with a stylized leaf inside next to the text.
A circular teal-colored design with a brown tree with numerous branches and leaves in the center, overlaid on a peach diamond pattern background, with white text that reads 'MAY YOUR MOTIONS HEALING.'
Circular logo featuring a howling wolf, pine trees, and mountain peaks, with the text 'Chilcatpetl Wolf Mountain Education Center'.
A logo for the annual Cumbre Juvnili, featuring a raised fist in the center, surrounded by a circular decorative border with earthy tones, images of cacti and corn at the bottom, and the event name in an arc at the top.

  • “I also wanted to express my gratitude to you, Monserrat, and the HAFN community for bringing such an amazing event to the land and to our community. I am so grateful I was able to attend Saturday afternoon and much of Sunday for learning, community conversation, and celebration of land, food, dance, and music. It was a deeply personal experience for me. I keep telling everyone I see about it…especially all the things I learned about corn from Monserrat! Witnessing your community sharing your Aztec dance and ceremony traditions on Sunday was really amazing! A special surprise for me was reconnecting with Mario Olvera. He is such a special person. When my kids were little, they were in art classes that he offered here in Longmont that were a really positive experience for them. On Sunday, he brought such amazing truth and vulnerability to the conversation about race with Ramon. The circle conversation about reconnecting buffalo and the land was also a highlight for me. I am excited about possibilities for more collaboration. Hope to see you again soon!”

    From Justin Atherton-Wood, | Planning Group Supervisor, Boulder County Parks and Open Space

  • “The festival was so wonderful. We are glad we could make it happen on county land. The volunteers, participants, and public were a true indication of the value this celebration means to all of us. Your community is vibrant and rich, and we look forward to working more together!”

    From Therese Glowacki, Boulder County Parks & Open Space Director

  • “My family and I greatly enjoyed the Harvest festival this past weekend. It was a great event, thanks so much for having us! Can you direct me to local resources for Native Americans, regarding history, culture, anything. I'd like to present this type of information to my social work team.”

    From Matthew Spencer Blank |Human Services Case Worker, Boulder County

  • "Below is a recent blog I wrote on a hike the weekend after Corn & Water Festival that really transformed my soul. I took an 11-hr. hike, with an accidental detour to a glacier at the divide, a valley of Mother Water Lake, flowing down to the Front Range- and literally down to the ground around where we’ll plant these trees to spread LIFE all around… and then sing songs all about it…! Wow!! Our school starts our day singing songs in a circle, where everyone is equal, beginning our day in gratitude, community & connection, and HAFN, Indigenous wisdom, like Tyson Yunkaporta, Ian Sanderson, Robin Wall Kimmerer and more have shaped me over the past season of my leadership at the school, like 18 months (a toddler in the life of my journey as Leader of this school my parents built and someone else ran. It is all about relationships, which grow in the season and time of their kind, so it’s super cool to be making all these HAFN connections! We hosted Grupo Tlaloc this summer for drumming & dancing with the children- we’d love to share this experience with children in our community.

    From Amy May |Corn Festival Attendee and Donor of HAFN

Water is Life: Everywhere the Water Flows, We Can Plant a Tree to Grow…

A mountain landscape with a turquoise lake at the base, surrounded by rocky slopes and peaks under a clear blue sky.
Read full article now!

Our own backyard here in Boulder County is the direct connection to our approach to water at Treehouse Learning and as residents of the Front Range Water Shed. At the Western Edge of the county in an area now known as the Indian Peaks Wilderness and the Continental Divide.

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