Thursday, April 23

Reception at 5:30 p.m.
Dinner and Program begin at 6:15 p.m. 

Colorado Springs Marriott
5580 Tech Center Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80919

Each year, Girl Scouts of Colorado honors several outstanding women in the Pikes Peak region to induct as the new class of Women of Distinction. These women have displayed exemplary leadership and commitment to advancing the profile of women and girls in our community. They serve as inspirations to Girl Scouts and exemplify the courage, confidence and character of the Girl Scout Leadership Experience.

Please contact Becky Grupe for any remaining sponsorship opportunities and tickets.

View past honorees here.

READ MORE HERE

Colorado Springs Literary Awards to honor historian children’s book author bookstore owners

The Frank Waters and Golden Quill Literary Awards Luncheon

Donna Guthrie is an idea person. A Colorado Springs-based writer of children’s books and producer of online educational videos, Guthrie’s ideas usually benefit the community, bring people together and advance a cause.

Take, for example, the 23rd Annual Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, coming Nov. 5, which Guthrie co-founded with Jere Martin, or the “6 Women Playwriting Festival,” which in April will hit its fifth year, and her recent creation of a network of some 50 Colorado Springs book clubs.

“I get a lot from working with other women, men too, on big projects,” Guthrie said. “It adds joy to my life to be involved. It’s a sense of accomplishment and something that will last. Like working for Habitat for Humanity, you see the houses you helped build and that’s an accomplishment. It’s something you can put your hands around.”

Since 2006, Guthrie’s main project has been “Meet Me at the Corner,” a website where children, ages 7-13, can take “virtual field trips” and look at other educational video podcasts. Guthrie is the producer and director.

“It occurred to me that non-fiction could be presented to kids in many ways,” she said. “There are questions and activity books and just fun on the website.”

Guthrie has written more than 20 books for children, including “Collect This! A Kid’s Guide to Collecting.” She’s also penned dozens of magazine articles and written several plays. A couple of years ago, the Smokebrush Theater performed Guthrie’s play “The Wedding Trunk.”

It’s no surprise then that Guthrie’s community activism, in addition to volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, includes helping libraries whenever possible. She’s a former member of the Pikes Peak Library District board.

Guthrie believes strongly in giving back to Colorado Springs, but her volunteer work also enriches her life.

“Some of the best friendships I have were developed through organizations I worked with,” Guthrie said.

Like her relationship with Martin. The pair cooked up the idea for the film festival while driving back from the Telluride Film Festival and lamenting that Colorado Springs seemed an unlikely place for one. But they gave it a whirl anyway. Now the festival is the longest running women’s film festival in America and attracts thousands.

“That makes me proud,” Guthrie said. “But I also like to pass the torch on. So many times organizations need new blood and new people and volunteers. I’m well known for starting something and not staying with it. And that’s not such a bad thing. New people bring new ideas and creative good for an organization.”

Guthrie said the support of her husband of 37 years, Mike Guthrie, helps when she’s engaged in one of her many projects.

Before Guthrie turns 70 in 2016, she wants to hike in each of America’s 58 national parks. Before she turned 50, she and Mike walked five miles in each of the 50 states. But they’re not doing it alone. Guthrie created a website, www.hikeallthenationalparks.com, so friends and family can log their own hikes, learn about all the national parks, get links to helpful hiking-related websites and leave tips and tricks.

“I love this town and want to create events for it,” Guthrie said. “There’s a lot of community interest in that direction, grassroots events. The women’s film festival is a perfect example of how one idea became an institution.”

Founded as a non-profit in 2011, as a very special birthday gift for Donna Guthrie by her friends and family,

this fund leverages the power of films, theater, and music to communicate the power of literature.

Our Mission

The Donna Guthrie Arts Fund embraces all forms of art — dance, theater, film, music — to engage audiences in the conversation about literacy and its inextricable link to living a passionate, meaningful life.

Grantees

The Six Women Playwriting Festival 2012-2016

The Colorado Springs Book Group Summer Roundup 2010-2014

The Read to the Children Program 2011-2013

The Children of the Canyon Fire 2012

Musical Mondays 2011-2013

Free Little Library 2013-2017

Youth Documentary Academy 2015

Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival 2016

The Pikes Peak Arts Council is supported in part by

Colorado Creative Industries and the National Endowment for the Arts

Fossil Craft Beer Company is the proud beer sponsor of Pikes Peak Arts Council Member Mixers

Why do brides-to-be make such a big deal out of selecting a wedding dress? Is it the countless princesses from childhood fairy tales? Or the endlessly photographed dresses of royalty and celebrities that have followed us into adulthood?

It’s the kind of encounter that happens in the movies, the kind completely out of the blue that ends up altering the trajectory of your life. It happened to Linda Broker in 1992, right when she moved to Colorado Springs from Pasadena, California. Unbeknownst to Broker, one of her new neighbors was an original organizer of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival.

“She strolled over and introduced herself and said, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna tell you the same thing I tell everybody who moves to town: You’ve got to come to the Women’s Film Festival. You know, it’s the best thing going,’” Broker says.

As a Springs newbie, Broker says she had no frame of reference—or friends—so she went.

It was a good move. “I don’t even think I’d been to a film festival before in my life,” Broker says. “She said ‘women’s film festival,’ and there was something that so resonated like, Oh, that’s gonna be awesome! And it was.”

She began volunteering the next year, and in 2000 the nonprofit hired Broker as its first executive director, a position she still holds 17 years later.

When Broker gathers with about 1,400 other attendees on the Colorado College campus this November for the 30th annual Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, they will all be participating in the longest running women’s film festival in North America—second in the world only to the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival in France. They will also be supporting a tradition that began 30 years ago with two locals, Donna Guthrie and Jere Martin.

As Broker tells it, the two had attended their first Telluride Film Festival that year and thought, Wouldn’t it be awesome to have something like this in Colorado Springs?“

They were also good feminists, and they thought it would be even more awesome to have a festival that focused on films by and about women,” Broker says. “It was 1987, and at that time, women were struggling to find different opportunities to showcase their work. That’s still true today, FYI.”

Guthrie and Martin knew nothing about programming or running a festival, but they forged ahead with the support of a couple key sponsors, Penrose Hospital and Holland & Hart law firm. A festival was born.

That first year, RMWFF showed about a dozen films, Broker says. As is still the focus, those pieces came from both national and international filmmakers. The size, however, has changed quite a bit over the years. With more than 40 films now, the range includes documentary and feature to shorts and animated. Those are selected by a jury from about 400 annual submissions. Screenings are held across four theaters, three on the Colorado College campus and one at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. And the festival often sells out its seats.

The organization itself has changed quite a bit as well. What was primarily a once-a-year festival grew into the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Institute in 2014, and over the years, additional programming has been added, from a Filmmakers Retreat to outreach programs with youth and community partners. This summer, the organization moved its office to a new suite with screening space inside the Lincoln Center.

The history is a credit to volunteers, staff, community support and thefilmmakers—who often submit films as often as they produce them, and cross their fingers hoping for an invitation.

One such filmmaker is Washington, D.C.-based Andrea Kalin, principal and founder of Spark Media. She has attended and screened films at three of the festivals, most recently First Lady of the Revolution in 2016. Her second appearance at RMWFF came 10 years after the first, and she says she wassurprised there were people in the audience who had seen her first film there a decade earlier.

“What I love about this festival is the audience,” Kalin says. “These are engaged cinephiles. They love film. They embrace the filmmakers. They make a point of coming back year after year. And many of the attendees that I’ve met organize as groups and in collectives and this festival turns into their annual pilgrimage. I think that’s really unique. I have not found that loyal base at other festivals, and over the years I’ve been to a lot.”

Kalin thinks RMWFF is special for another reason as well. “It’s not necessarily a festival where you’re looking for acquisition or where distribution deals are made,” she says. “But this festival allows you to hit the pause on the deal-making and the award-collecting and really get together with a group of badass filmmakers and feel renewed and inspired. Seriously. It creates a sisterhood.”

Broker agrees, noting that festivals come in all different kinds of sizes and categories. “We will never be a Sundance or a Toronto or a Tribeca, one of those top-tier festivals,” she says. “But for a regional-themed festival, honestly, we’re perceived as really one of the top festivals where filmmakers want to have their film. And they want to come to the festival.”

It’s never been RMWFF’s objective to restrict the programming to films that haven’t already been seen, or that might already be available through another platform, Broker explains. Instead, film curators look at the programming with an eye to what the audience is going to appreciate. “We see it as an opportunity to expose the community to maybe some different ways of looking at the world, or exposing them to an issue or a topic that seems relevant today,” she says. And there’s more to the festival than the films themselves.

“If you go to see a movie, maybe you go with friends, but this weekend is an experience to be shared with your neighbors, your family, your friends,” says Sarah Arnold, RMWFF marketing coordinator. “You can’t get that at home with Netflix.”

It’s worth noting too that despite its title, the weekend experience is not only for women. RMWFF’s mission statement of “celebrating the drive, spirit and diversity of women” resonates through the art and the audience, which includes many men. The selection committee will even accept a film made by a man if it reflects that criteria and includes a female director, producer or editor.

“I think that people feel first of all that it’s really just for women, and having attended, there are a lot of men that attend as well,” Broker says. “The subjects that are reflected in the films are often focused just as much on men as they are on women. My dad’s been coming for probably 15 years.”

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO … COLORADO SPRINGS

The Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Institute has screened a highly lauded list of films, including these that had won or went on to win Academy Awards.

When we were celebrating our 36th anniversary in 2009, we started talking about all the places we still wanted to go. Then we hatched a plan: By 2016 — the year we’d both turn 70 and the National Park Service would turn 100 — we would visit all 59 national parks.

We set some rules. We’d have a picture made at every park entrance; we’d spend at least two days in the park; we’d attend one ranger talk if we could; and we’d hike at least five miles. (Where that’s a problem, as in Everglades National Park, an activity like kayaking could substitute.)

We didn’t realize quite the extent of what we were taking on. But we’ve gotten all the way to the National Park of American Samoa, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. And to Kobuk Valley National Park, 35 miles above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Kobuk is essentially a vast sand dune, with no facilities and lots of mosquitoes. You’re flown in on a little Cessna and dropped off with a tent. If you’re lucky, the pilot will be back in two days to pick you up.

Yellowstone was one of our favorites, especially since we missed the crowds by going in February. At that time of year the snow is deep, and daytime temperatures often range from 0° F to 20° F. We flew into Bozeman, Mont., and joined a Yellowstone Park Foundation trip, where guides took us in a cat-track van called a snow coach to the Old Faithful Snow Lodge. We rode through a heard of bison. We did some cross-country skiing and snowshoeing and saw so much wildlife, including wolves, whose once-decimated population is now growing, thanks to protection within the park.

Now we’ve got only two more to go: Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. We’re planning a big party in September in Rocky Mountain National Park, near our home in Colorado Springs, which is where we started the quest.

Author Wallace Stegner’s quote sums up our feelings: “National parks are the best idea we ever had.” We couldn’t have said it better. —As told to Christina Ianzito

National Park Bests:

Birthplace of America
Urban Wilderness
Ken Burns Family Tradition
Rain Forest Rebirth
Native American Heritage
Rock Climbers Paradise

Also of Interest

• 4 reasons to hire a travel agent

One day in the summer of 1983, Donna Guthrie ’68 left her young family in Colorado and headed to Los Angeles. She brought a manuscript for a children’s book along, which she hoped to get in the hands of an editor at a writer’s conference.

Guthrie had been nursing a dream of becoming a writer since childhood. She had written several manuscripts for children’s books, but up to that point, received no interest from publishers.

“I’d made a firm decision that unless I received a ‘sign’ of some sort at that conference, I would unplug my electric typewriter and go back to being a full-time wife, mother, friend, and volunteer,” Guthrie says.

At the conference, an editor from Harcourt decided to take a shot on the first-time author. The Witch Who Lives Down the Hall began a remarkable run for Guthrie — one that continues to this day for the 73-year-old author, filmmaker, lecturer, and podcast host.

This fall, Page Street Publishing Co. will publish Guthrie’s 25th book, Flibbertigibbery Words, the story of a young William Shakespeare who awakens one day to a torrent of words pouring into his open window. As he attempts to wrangle the words, they lead him out of the house and into encounters with many of the characters he wrote about in his plays.

“I’m often on the lookout for places or topics that haven’t been written about,” says Guthrie. “My husband, Mike, and I have gone to a number of Shakespeare festivals, and I began to notice how few picture books there are about Shakespeare.”

Flibbertigibbet Words, Guthrie says, is really about creativity — a topic she’s well-versed in. In addition to being an author, Guthrie has embraced a variety of forms and subjects.

She is the co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, the longest-running women’s film festival in North America. She hosts a podcast on the history of country music called Looking Back on Music Row. She founded an audiovisual company called Kids Corner that produced films to educate children about medical, health, and family issues, which she later sold to Myers Broadcasting Company.

“Not all of my ideas come true, but I try to focus on one thing at a time,” Guthrie says. “I know it’s difficult sometimes for artistic people to put the legs underneath an idea. I think I have a great support system in Colorado Springs. I couldn’t have done some of these things elsewhere, but I could do it here.”

Although Colorado Springs has been her home for many years, Guthrie is originally from Pennsylvania. She grew up on a large family farm in Amity, a few hundred miles away from Rider. It was far enough from home to create some distance and allow her to grow, but not too far where she couldn’t get home in a pinch if needed.

She majored in journalism and wrote for the student newspaper. But after graduating she found it easier to get a job as a teacher than a reporter. She earned a certificate to teach at Montessori schools and eventually packed up to teach in Colorado.

In Colorado, Guthrie married and started a family, but she still hungered for a writing career. She wrote her first manuscripts while her young children napped. “We had a very small house at the time, and we cleaned out a closet and set up a board and a chair so I could have a place to write,” Guthrie says. ‘I wrote in that closet for a very long time.”

Over the years, she has identified some elements that make up a good children’s book. “Children’s writing has changed over time, but basically, you still need a good story,” Guthrie says. “Something needs to happen to the main character. It has to have a rhythm, almost like a poem. And you have to remember who is reading the books: It’s the adults. In my books, I try to always include things that appeal to adults.”

Many of Guthrie’s books have received favorable reviews from publications like Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. The reviews are gratifying, and they help Guthrie with her main goals: “I’d like to have my books in as many kids’ hands as possible,”’ she says, “and I’d like the books to last.”