About
Seth Palmer Harris has spent twenty years on Colorado’s Front Range. Most recently Director of Development at Visionbox in Denver; before that, Meow Wolf Denver — where he was part of the workplace organizing campaign — and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. For eight years, he has been a scenario actor and training coach for high-stakes interpersonal work — Crisis Intervention Team training for law enforcement and fire departments, family-interview training for social workers entering child welfare, de-escalation training for customer service workers and utility linemen. Different audiences, the same underlying discipline. He has held multiple board roles in arts and civic organizations across the region.
BRS is based in Colorado Springs. Peer civic-strategy practices cluster in NYC, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; the Front Range has effectively none. Place-rootedness is itself the differentiation. The work happens inside the working relationships built over twenty years on the Front Range — civic leaders, planning staff, organizers, people who have served in government. That is what place-rootedness actually means: knowing how decisions move in this region, who carries them, where leverage sits.
The practice’s intellectual position sits in a particular tradition — Harry Boyte’s civic-agency framework, Paulo Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy, Grace Lee Boggs and adrienne maree brown on emergence and movement work, Elinor Ostrom on the governance of commons. The work draws on that thinking the way any practice draws on its sources: not as doctrine, but as the shape of attention it brings to a question.
To start a conversation, email seth@backroomstrategies.com.