Roger Kahn was born and raised in Queens, NY. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, and eight undergraduate and graduate colleges and universities where he studied the social sciences, majoring in sociology with an emphasis on social movements, organizations, and research methodology.

During the 1960s, he worked as a community organizer and researcher in the Civil Rights Movement with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (SEDFRE), and the National Urban League.

 In 1970, he moved to a small town in rural Western Colorado (Crested Butte) that had no paved streets and fewer people than did the apartment building in which he grew up. There, he served on the Town Council and established an “organization development and communications” consulting firm.

 While maintaining his involvements in Crested Butte, in the mid-1970s he moved to Denver to continue his organizing work. He was executive director of a state-wide student organization (COPIRG), and then organized another state-wide education and advocacy non-profit that addressed labor, community, environment and energy issues (the Colorado Coalition for Full Employment).

In the 1980s and early ‘90s, he was an instructor of community development service at Metropolitan State College in Denver, and then became a professor of non-profit organization management at Regis University, where he founded the graduate department of non-profit organizations and served as the director of the Nonprofit Organization Leadership Institute.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, he developed small businesses in several Colorado rural towns. He now skis, hikes, bikes, fishes and writes. His first book, “How Crested Butte Became a Tourist Town: Drugs, Sex, Sports, and Social Conflict” is a local best seller.

Today, he lives in both Denver and Crested Butte (now one of the nation’s many recreation exurbs), is married, the father of two adult sons, five grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.