SPEAKER_00 0:00

The frequency. Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, August 5th. I'm your host, Shay Castle. And this is the Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. Today's episode is brought to you by the Regional Air Quality Council. This year, set the summer trend. Take simple steps for better air, and go electric with your lawn care equipment. Through the end of 2026, take advantage of a 30% point-of-sale discount on all new electric leaf blowers, lawnmowers, and trimmers at participating retailers statewide. Maintaining your property without gas emissions helps reduce ground-level ozone pollution in the front range and protects your health. Learn more at SimpleStepsbetterAir.org. Today, we've got an interview with a Longmont man helping people get rewards for their good deeds. But first, the headlines. Sundance announced its dates and locations for the now Boulder-based film festival. The festival runs January 21st to 31st. Screenings and festival events will be held at Mackey Auditorium, Row Green Theater, Munzinger Auditorium, Boulder Theater, Etown Hall, Canyon Theater at the Boulder Library, Chautauqua Auditorium, the Dairy Arts Center, Boulder High School, and Casey Middle School. More information on passes and tickets will be released in September, with sales beginning in October. The film lineup will not be announced until December. The festival itself will be headquartered at Hotel Bolderado. Workers at the historic site are attempting to unionize after they say new venture capitalist owners have cut staff, increased workloads, and degraded working conditions overall. Workers are gathering every other Wednesday in front of Hotel Dolderado to protest these practices. The next picket will be Wednesday, August 12th at 4.45 p.m.

SPEAKER_05 2:15

Every other week, we have one this week. So in two weeks on Wednesday, 4.45 in front of the Boldorado, please, we would so love to see you there. We feel like we're really starting to make waves and make a change in this town because if we can unionize the Bulderado, we can unionize all of Boulder.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

In other labor news, Boulder City Council on Thursday declined to make any changes to tipped wages. Boulder's tipped hourly wage is set to rise to $15 per hour next year. Council had been considering adjustments that would have allowed restaurants to pay tipped workers a smaller hourly wage. Many workers reported being unaware of the possible changes and said they were left out of the city's process. An organized opposition campaign was led by local unions, labor groups, and the Boulder Chapter of Democratic Socialist for America, who held a rally in March to Thursday's meeting and packed council chambers for the public hearing. At a June 25th first reading, all council members except for Nicole Speer agreed to move the matter forward. But when the ordinance came for a second vote last week, no council member was willing to call for a vote. Opponents of the cuts called council's inaction a huge win for workers, but said the fight for livable wages and cities continues. The city announced last week. Nebraska-based ALO Communications began leasing the city's fiber internet backbone in 2025, with a goal to provide high-speed internet to 97% of city residents by 2030. In a letter to the city, the company cited rising labor and material costs as well as increased competition. A representative asked Boulder officials to agree to mutual termination of the contract, offering the city the ability to retain a $1.5 million payment from ALO that has already been made. ALO will continue to provide internet to existing customers while negotiating a transition plan, according to the letter. In a news release, city manager Nuria Rivera Vandermeid said Boulder would be assessing its options and looking for a new private partner. Construction of the fiber backbone was completed in 2024. Roughly 65 miles of fiber were laid at a cost of around $20 million. Read more from the City and Boulder Reporting Lab at the links in our show notes.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Carmi is a platform where you get rewarded for giving away free items and helping people. So it works by someone that needs help with something like breaking their leaves or carrying a heavy item or fixing their car, can post and ask for help. And then someone who wants to help can go in there and claim to help them, and they get points for doing that once it's confirmed. It also is a place where if you have a dresser that you don't need anymore or a couch or something, and you don't want to just send it to the landfill or you haven't had good luck with buy nothing groups, you can post it on there and you can also get rewarded for doing that. You get rewarded by collecting karma points, which that's what we call them. You could use those karma points for discounts and freebies and gift cards from our brand marketplace where we work with local businesses and cool online brands. I'm Connor Moynihan. I'm a Boulder County resident and I live in Longmont, and I'm the founder of Carmi.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Tell me a little bit about where this idea came from and how and why you got started.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

It kind of came about during COVID. At the very beginning, everyone was really scared and we didn't know what was going on. I joined a Facebook group when I lived in Boulder. I think it was called like the coronavirus coping community. And people were in there trying to help each other, hosting things, and there was a lot of elderly people asking for help for people to go grocery shopping for them. And so I started doing that for one woman on the weekly basis, and she always left me cookies on her porch as a reward, like no contact. She'd just leave a plate of cookies with a note that says thank you. And I'd drop off the groceries and then she'd venomo me for what I spent on the groceries. And I wanted to do more of that. I just wanted to be able to go and just do good deeds and kind of do that in an easy way. And I was doing it for her pretty regularly, but I was like struggling. There's more people asking for that, and I was kind of struggling to connect with them and get organized about it. Sitting on that for a couple of years or so and still wanting to help out in a way. And so I started working on this platform. And that's where it started. It started from kind of that moment where I wanted to help people, but couldn't find an organized way to do it.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

How do the points work? Is everything worth the same? Do you decide this is worth X amount of points and this is worth this much?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

We have recommendations for that, but we kind of leave it up to the user. We monitor an audit, but as it grows, there might be more need for that. But the recommendation is an hour worth of work is 10 points. And then to put that to a monetary perspective, we have a $50 Sprouts gift card on there for 450 points. But it's up to the brands that are in the marketplace. They can work with their business model to figure out what they want to make their discounts or freebies worth. And then it's up to the user to figure out what they think the person's time is valued and how much they think their task is worth or their free item is worth. And I think as it grows, that'll get more concrete. But I want it to be kind of user-led a little bit so we can figure out what works for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

And so you've shared a couple of the things that you can do to get karma points. What about volunteering for like established nonprofits? Is there an avenue for nonprofits to partner with the app?

SPEAKER_02 8:14

Yeah, totally. So we have a nonprofit portal. It kind of works like I would say, like Eventbrite or like evite or something. The nonprofit can go in there. They can request to be in there, they can get verified. It can work for other organizations too, farms, stuff like that. But basically, they go in there and they can post their event. They can post how many points it's worth for doing their event, and then they can see who volunteers for it and they can post the date. And then when the event is done, they can click how many points they want the volunteers to receive and they receive the points. And so it's a way that they can organize and see who's volunteering. They have a map feature so people can see the map and the address and the timing, but that's also a way to reward and incentivize their volunteers. So currently we are onboarding with Boulder Food Rescue. So they're using it as a way to reward their onboarding and their training. So people that are being trained for Boulder Food Rescue, they're like bike riders and stuff like that, ride around and rescue the food. They're doing that. So when they complete their onboarding training, they get rewarded with points. And so that's something I'm really excited about.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Let's take a little break from my interview with Connor to hear from Boulder Food Rescue. Development manager Sean Kohler was on the show last week, July 31st, to talk about the nonprofit that saves food from grocery stores and restaurants and delivers it to over 7,000 Boulder County residents. While they were here, I also asked Sean about working with Carmi. Here's what they had to say.

SPEAKER_03 9:41

One of the things that's really hard about showing volunteer appreciation with our model is we don't have one location the volunteers come to. I volunteered at a few organizations in the past, one that I'm volunteering at currently, and they have a lot of the volunteer appreciation table where they'll buy coffee or delicious snacks for the volunteers, or have this place where it's like, hey, you come here every other Friday when you do check out the table. There's things on there for you. We don't really have a place where volunteers can check in with that. And what really excites us about the idea of partnering with Carmi is that volunteers could then use their volunteering time, log it through Carmi, and get that form of appreciation in gift cards, discounts with local businesses that gets to the same end result of us having a volunteer appreciation table at our organization. We don't have the capacity to track down all of our volunteers and hand them a gift card that just takes too long. Also, a lot of our volunteers don't have the flexibility to meet us at our office during some of our working hours. So being able to bridge that gap is really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Another thing Sean appreciates about Carmi system is how hard Connor and the team are working to fit themselves into what Boulder Food Rescue is already doing. The two are even talking about building a separate Carmi portal for Boulder Food Rescue's 900 volunteers.

SPEAKER_03 11:19

That has been a big part of why there is excitement for building what that will look like. Not the norm from my experience when a third party reaches out trying to innovate your volunteer programming.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Connor would love to work with more nonprofits or even farms to find a way to reward volunteers beyond what the organizations themselves can offer.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

I want to work with more things like that. An ideal nonprofit would be like trail work or something like that, who needs trail work in the Boulder County area, like to maintain our trails or cleanups, farm cleanups, stuff like that, where they need people and they want to reward them.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

So I'm gonna assume that you're not simply doing this out of the goodness of your own heart, although maybe you are. What's the business model look like? What are your plans for monetization or are you covering your costs?

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Yeah, totally. So right now our costs are pretty low. We're just paying posting fees, like probably under $100 a month just to keep it live and stuff like that. But eventually, when we start to get a lot of businesses in there and they're getting purchases and it's becoming profitable for them, we're gonna charge a monthly fee for the businesses to be in the marketplace. Thinking of around $300 a month, I want to see what's working for the businesses. And it may be a scaling thing based on the size of your business, size of your revenue. We're also playing around with a commission model. So maybe like a 5% commission on purchases through our marketplace, coupon redemptions. We'll have to play around with technology on how that works. But that's what I'm aiming for. But really, I want to just focus on getting businesses in there first because the overhead is not big with this right now. So it can grow. And I want to just try to really get a lot of like local businesses, farms, local shops, local makers, even like I have a local contractor in there, stuff like that. But yes, eventually there'll be a commission or a monthly fee charged.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Give me your elevator pitch for local businesses. Why is this something that they should be involved with?

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Local businesses can get in touch with and get in contact with community customers who are gonna have repeat business and it's gonna show a sense of goodwill for you, sense of goodwill for your customers. And instead of running cold ads on Meta, Google, where prices are getting higher, conversion rates are getting lower, and there's an ethical sense there where you might not necessarily trust those platforms. This is something where people can get rewarded for doing good deeds. And it's an honorable thing where they can spend this reward with your business. People like coupons, they like to be getting a good deal. And I think it can be honest and real, where the businesses can have a percentage that works for them and it can be a real value for the customers. I think it'll drive really great repeat customers.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Let's talk a little bit about the area that this is covering right now and your vision for it.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

I live in Longmont. I started out in Boulder and then I slowly started moving north where things were getting more and more affordable. Starting in Longmont, I think it's a community where it's a little bit more working class sometimes. People can afford to buy houses and where also people might need more help. So I'm growing it in Longmont. We have 270 users and growing all in the Longmont area, but I'm also trying to grow through Boulder County. I think just in general, Boulder County is a great place for this where people are always searching for a sense of community and trying to help out. I'm also thinking about some of the smaller mountain communities where they might be really connected and this could grow really fast in those smaller mountain communities. So eventually maybe I'll start targeting those areas as well. My dream with this would be if I get it to the point where I can have people smarter, more organized than me running it. I can log on the app every day and go do different good deeds all day and be able to survive off of that. So that would be really cool. We've done some cool stuff on there already. Someone posted on there, they just moved to Longmont and they just didn't have the means to get Christmas gifts for their five kids. So they posted in the app. I claimed it right away. And I it was really fun. Me and my wife went out and bought Christmas gifts for this whole family. And then another one was we were able to connect with someone in there who had lost their leg and needed a wheelchair, and they weren't getting an insurance claim. It was gonna take like a few years. So I actually partnered with a local Longmont realtor, Noah Inhofer. He's someone I know through jujitsu. And we partnered together and we found a nice power wheelchair and we split the cost and we went and we delivered it to this guy, and he was super excited about it. His son was pushing him around in like a transport wheelchair, so it was really cool to give him a power wheelchair that he could control so he could have more freedom. And I'm hoping we'll have more people that are doing the good deeds in there too.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Thanks again to Connor and Sean for speaking with me. Learn more and join the community at karmi.net. That's k-a-r-my.net. Join us Friday when we revisit another way to help your neighbors and get free stuff in return. We're going back to Boulder Time Bank. As always, thanks for listening. We're ending today's show with a little guided breathing exercise from Denver therapist Colin Baker. Colin is a licensed professional counselor and licensed addictions counselor. They have been working at the intersection of queerness, trauma, and addiction for nearly a decade. They are the founder and owner of Briar and Balm Counseling, which offers services remotely to individuals and families throughout Colorado. Here's Colin with one more thing.

SPEAKER_04 16:49

Today we're going to be doing a breathing technique called 478 breathing. You might be familiar with it, others might be familiar with it. The premise is it's a controlled inhale, a controlled breath hold, followed by a controlled exhale. The numbers indicate how many seconds you do each part for. Inhaling for four seconds, holding for seven, and then exhaling for eight, and then inhaling again. We are gonna do this together three times. Inhaling for four, holding for seven, and exhaling for eight, and I will count us. Go ahead and exhale all of your air for three, and then we're gonna inhale and two, one, and then inhale. This is a breathing technique that can help us bring ourselves back to the present, help ourselves hold ourselves grounded and focused, and really help direct our attention back to what it is that we are doing in the moment when we are feeling like we are getting ahead of ourselves or like the world around us is moving way too quickly. Slowing it down, bringing our attention back inwards, can sometimes help return our internal resources to ourselves.