In August 2020, New Era Colorado published our first organizational equity statement. We want to ensure this statement is not one that sits on the shelf, but rather is a commitment we revise and reflect on regularly. This update is one way that we hold ourselves accountable to people and partners who identify as Black, brown, Indigenous, and/or people of color by acknowledging the organization’s progress, shortcomings, and where we need to grow.
In 2024, we implemented new hiring practices in order to diversify our team including using job boards that specifically target Black and brown applicants and relying more on connector outreach to recruit candidates. Our interview questions explicitly ask about commitment to anti-racism and equity with ranging levels of proficiency required for different positions. Currently, 50% of our permanent staff identify as people of color which was shy of our goal of 55%, so we have more work to meet our goals. We also emphasized diversity in recruiting our seasonal canvassing team and internship program, with 50% of our seasonal staff identifying as people of color. Focusing on connector outreach and 1:1 recruitment was very successful this year and we’ll keep honing that strategy for hiring.
We know that diversifying our team is just the first step toward an inclusive community. That’s why our other organizational policies aim to create a welcoming community that supports people of color once they are on board.
All white permanent staff members continue to attend the intensive, multi-week long Facing Racism series with Soul 2 Soul Sisters per our original statement. Our white caucus meets regularly to continue our learning around whiteness, privilege, allyship, and intersectionality. This year, the white caucus read the book American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress by Wesley Lowery as part of our ongoing learning.
The people of color caucus meets regularly to build community, inform organizational decisions, and foster healing. The POC caucus held a post-election retreat focused on healing, rest, and relationship building to support in dealing with the presidential election results.
We continued our work with Regan Byrd, LLC on transformative justice as an approach to conflict management. We participated in several workshops to learn the principles and practices of transformative justice, resulting in a new conflict policy and harm reduction flowchart rooted in abolitionist principles. We are now implementing that framework and working to see conflict as generative and address interpersonal conflict in a healthy way. We know this work requires grappling with trauma, bias, and societal aversions to conflict that we will need to continue to unpack and work toward. We also worked with Barbara Bonner and Enid Carlson on our own conflict styles and how to approach conflict in a self-aware and trauma-informed manner.
Our equity committee, FREE, continues to meet regularly and hold the organization accountable to its equity goals. The latest iteration of the committee focused on the transformative justice project with Regan and served as a consultant for team members who needed to grapple with equity challenges. The committee will now renew membership in 2025.
Thanks to our collective commitment to transformative justice, we came into the renegotiation of our collective bargaining agreement with those principles in mind: assuming best intentions, understanding perspectives, and finding a path forward. We are pleased to share that we have a tentative agreement for our new contract that includes increased pay by 7%, more holidays, $150 more in professional development funds, 3% raises for bilingual employees, and increased technology stipends. When our staff salaries and benefits are more competitive, that means higher recruitment and retention for staff of color.
This year, we grappled with the shortcomings of our rapid response protocol as an organization and how it limited our ability to express solidarity in moments of crisis or oppression outside of our organizational influence. With the support of the POC caucus, we have revised our rapid response protocol to better tier out responses so that we can manage capacity while also expressing solidarity for impacted communities during traumatic events. This protocol will be put to the test as we prepare for an onslaught of rapid response moments with the coming administration and we will have to figure out the balance between protecting our capacity to do our work and also the importance of showing our values to our base and sticking up for the most marginalized communities.
We continue to root our policy work in the Youth Agenda, an explicitly anti-racist and abolitionist platform co-created with young people. We also helped pass Occupancy Limits and Cause Required for Eviction at the state legislature—to support chosen families who live together to afford the rising costs of housing and protect renters from unjust evictions. These housing policies will benefit communities of color who are unjustly targeted by housing discrimination and evictions.
New Era was essential in turning out young voters for Amendment 79 to enshrine the right to abortion, free from government interference, in our state constitution. This ballot measure is the only one in the country that not only protects the legal right to care, but expands access and affordability to nearly a million Coloradans by overturning a decades-old funding ban on state-provided insurance, including Medicaid recipients. We took on the entire 18-34 year old universe for the campaign and centered anti-racist messaging.
Looking forward, we want to be even more intentional and explicit with our anti-racist work and the connection between our housing policy and anti-racism. We also anticipate a lot of opposition work coming our way with the new administration and we will be in solidarity with our partners to protect our communities.
We brought back our endorsement program for the first time in 12 years and developed a rigorous framework to assess Youth Agenda Champions, which included commitment to anti-racist policies and abolitionist principles. Champions had to meet an incredibly high threshold for our endorsement and we prioritized candidates who identify as young, Black or brown, and/or queer. We are pleased to share that 60% of our candidates identified as Black or brown and we elected two Youth Agenda Champions to the state legislature: Yara Zokaie in HD-52 (Ft. Collins) and Katie Stewart in HD-59 (Durango). However, we lost some tough races and clearly have to work to strengthen our primary program. We realized we needed our canvass team earlier for the primaries and plan to staff up in the spring of 2026 so we can win more races and elect more Youth Agenda Champions through our primary program.
Our c3 voter turnout program was exclusively focused on turning out young voters who identify as Black, brown, or Indigenous. This program included almost 300,000 pieces of mail, over a million phone calls, and tens of thousands of texts. Turnout among young people of color rose 7 percentage points from 2020 due to this focused campaign. We also had a fully bilingual voter guide for the first time and used a young, Spanish-speaker as our translator so that the guide felt authentic for young Spanish speakers.
In our ongoing efforts to transform into a transformational model of political engagement, we went deep into our power building philosophy as a team. Our full organizing team participated in a rigorous boot camp by People’s Action on base building and power building. Our full team did a deep dive into power building philosophy using resources from Practical Radicals and together, we co-created a philosophy of power building and organizing that we can use cross-departmentally. We finalized our ladder of engagement, or as we call it, “laddership,” that details how we move young people to deeper engagement with our programming and actualization of their own power. We are now implementing the laddership and tweaking how we will track progress and movement across departments. In 2024, we moved 6% of our base through the laddership and now have a more formalized way of tracking people that move through our organization so we don’t lose them.
We also expanded our base building into more Black, brown, and Spanish-speaking communities this year, particularly in Colorado Springs, Greeley, and Aurora. Three of our regional lead organizers are bilingual and organize across languages, expanding our base and reach across the state. In 2025, we want to focus on building our high school program to meet more young people of color and bring them into our base. We also canvassed in new areas across the state around abortion access, which brought some challenges and we developed internal systems and trainings to keep our staff space, especially Black and brown staff members.
2025 will bring a big change for the organization: Nicole Hensel is passing the torch as executive director, and our current deputy director, Christina Soliz, will be the next leader of New Era. Christina makes history as the first person of color to lead the organization, and it’s past time for a woman of color to sit at the helm of the organization. Christina has both the lived experience and track record to steer New Era in the right direction. However, we also know all too well what happens to women of color when they reach the top: they are often held to unrealistic standards and treated with less respect from funders, partners, and staff. We are doing our best internally to reverse these trends with frank conversations, and as our community, we ask for your backing as Christina steps into this much-deserved leadership position. We know she has what it takes, and her perspective is desperately needed in this moment when there is so much at stake for our communities.
In 2025, New Era is meeting the political moment by passing policies that show young people how democracy should work; offering a political home for young people, particularly young people of color; and bringing young white men back to our coalition and vision for an equitable future. Our work ahead is to elect true Youth Agenda Champions to the state and local levels in order to protect against the federal administration’s attacks and deliver on meaningful progress. Now more than ever, young people will lead us into the future where we demand our rights are protected, our freedoms are secured, and we all have what we need to thrive.
2025 will bring a big change for the organization: Nicole Hensel is passing the torch as executive director, and our current deputy director, Christina Soliz, will be the next leader of New Era. Christina makes history as the first person of color to lead the organization, and it’s past time for a woman of color to sit at the helm of the organization. Christina has both the lived experience and track record to steer New Era in the right direction. However, we also know all too well what happens to women of color when they reach the top: they are often held to unrealistic standards and treated with less respect from funders, partners, and staff. We are doing our best internally to reverse these trends with frank conversations, and as our community, we ask for your backing as Christina steps into this much-deserved leadership position. We know she has what it takes, and her perspective is desperately needed in this moment when there is so much at stake for our communities.
In 2025, New Era is meeting the political moment by passing policies that show young people how democracy should work; offering a political home for young people, particularly young people of color; and bringing young white men back to our coalition and vision for an equitable future. Our work ahead is to elect true Youth Agenda Champions to the state and local levels in order to protect against the federal administration’s attacks and deliver on meaningful progress. Now more than ever, young people will lead us into the future where we demand our rights are protected, our freedoms are secured, and we all have what we need to thrive.