2025 Award Winners

The KVNF News Team is celebrating an incredible awards year where the high quality professional journalism we bring you was recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Colorado Broadcasters Association.

Project 7 Water Authority serves nearly the entire Uncompahgre Valley with reliable safe potable water for the valley's 60,000 residents. The Water Authority is proposing to build a new treatment plant to serve its 6 member's distribution systems, proposing to significantly improve the resiliency of the system, because the current system has many single points of failure.

Ranching is a foundation of the US West and The Western Slope, and has been for more than a century, but the way we raise beef cattle has been industrialized over the last half century. A local rancher is flipping the script on the industrialization of the cattle industry - pioneering new (and old) ways of thinking about raising cows.

In late July, over 50 musicians from across Colorado and the country came to the tiny mountain town of Lake City. They were here to put on a band concert. It's not a paying gig. They do it for the love of music. As Laura Palmisano reports for KVNF, they had two days to prepare for the show.

According to recent state data, vaccination rates in Colorado for K-12 schools are still below pre-pandemic levels. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment hopes to reverse that trend. The agency sent out notices to parents whose children are behind on vaccines. Its mobile public health clinic is also hitting the road this summer to provide vaccines in undeserved areas.

A Lake City physician assistant discusses his medical mission in Ukraine and a Grand Junction doctor talks about her most recent humanitarian trip to Gaza that abruptly ended when war broke out.

South of Montrose on Highway 550 sits one of the most unique farms in the state of Colorado known as Billy Goat Hop Farm owned by Chris DellaBianca and Audrey Gehlhausen.

KVNF's Lisa Young interviews Natasha Leger, Executive Director for Citizens for a Healthy Community located in Paonia, Colorado and Lea Linse , Conservation Programs Manager for Ecoflight, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and advocating for the protection of remaining wild lands and wildlife habitat using small aircraft.