Several important principles and values are meant to underlie all of the Center’s work.  These include:

• The belief that this mountainous, trans-national region, centered over the “spine” of North America – the Rocky Mountains -- is unique and a place that requires special attention and study as a region.
• The belief that understanding the region’s history and cultural diversity and heritage is essential to having a more clear and shared regional identity and sense of our present condition.
• The belief in the growing importance of developing and sustaining regional awareness, knowledge, and perspective in understanding our past and present condition and in visualizing future trends and directions.
• The belief that true and lasting economic and social health and well-being for the region’s people and communities can only be found and sustained in development scenarios that provide for the careful use and protection of the region’s high quality air, water, and land resources.
• The belief that important starting points for understanding our region’s past, present, and future condition, lies in recognition and careful study of the region’s "first people" – its many tribal peoples.
• The belief in healthy interaction and exchange across the region’s U.S.-Canada border – the “Medicine Line” -- in developing important context and new ways of thinking about the region’s shared future.
• The belief that the region’s advancement depends upon being able to imagine future choices and alternatives across and beyond the constraints of sometimes narrow and competing ideologies.
• An optimistic belief in the future of the Rocky Mountain West.