Summer 2026 · Colorado Springs
A place to think
out loud.
The Palmer institute is a civic education center opening in Colorado Springs — built on the conviction that how people meet each other in a room shapes how they meet each other in a city.
What We Believe
Colorado Springs has churches, gyms, bars, hiking trails, and a good university. What it doesn’t have is a serious, secular gathering place — a room where people you wouldn’t otherwise meet sit with an idea worth two hours of an evening.
The institute is built on a simple conviction: the way people treat each other in a room is the way they’ll treat each other in a city. If you can change what happens in the room, you can change what happens outside it.
Care, as the foundation. Curiosity, as the behavior. Imagination, as the medium through which things become possible. These are not soft ideas. They are the infrastructure on which civic life depends, practiced in a room, twelve people at a time, until the habit holds.
We don’t teach people what to think. We create the conditions in which they think better, together.
Named For
General William Jackson Palmer founded Colorado Springs in 1871. In a Gilded Age defined by extraction, he built a city with a different intent — donating thousands of acres for public parks, founding Colorado College, and laying out a place for the kind of life he believed people deserved.
The institute that carries his name carries that intent forward.
Built By
Seth Palmer Harris — community connector, partnership builder, and cultural strategist. Twenty years along Colorado’s Front Range, in arts and culture. An initiative of Back Room Strategies.
Summer 2026
Stay close.
We’ll write you once, when the first programs open. No list, no nurture sequence. One note.