A few months after Olivia Christiansen cried what she calls “triumphant tears” while watching a bill she’d drafted clear the final hurdle before becoming law, her tears returned.
Triumphant, once again.
In that moment she had learned that a friend of a friend was on her way to college, thanks to Christiansen’s legislation-turned-law that gave Colorado students in the foster care system the opportunity to pursue higher education with full costs covered by the state and colleges and universities and additional support, including mentoring.
“Anybody who doesn’t have access to higher education has been failed by our systems because higher education is a human right,” Christiansen, 18, told The Colorado Sun. “And so I was thinking that a really good way to (help) people improve their lives and make sure that they have what they are entitled to is by funding higher education.”
The Poudre High School graduate set that consequential change in motion in 2022 through the Colorado Youth Advisory Council, the legislature’s longtime nonpartisan organization that opens the Capitol up to teens across the state. The student members are idea-makers and policy shakers who urge lawmakers to listen to their generation by crafting and presenting their own legislative proposals.
The organization, also referred to as COYAC, is recruiting students ages 14 to 19 to fill many open seats across Colorado and take a lead role in turning lawmakers’ attention toward the defining issues of their daily lives and futures starting in the next legislative session. COYAC has positions available for students in 24 state senate districts (find your district here) and is also looking for students to step into one Southern Ute Indian Tribe seat, one Ute Mountain Ute Tribe seat and one at-large seat with a priority for rural participants.
Applications are due by Wednesday night.
Through COYAC, students meet individually with the lawmakers from their districts, conduct “college-level research” on policy issues of their choice and dig into “some super nerdy policy terminology,” Sarah Moss, director of the organization, said.
“They have a perspective that doesn’t often get heard at the Capitol,” Moss said. “And while we often see youth testify on one-off bills, this program allows students to really be part of a yearlong legislative process and sometimes multiyear and live the highs and the lows of a policy proposal that may or may not make it through the process.”
Students this year pitched four bills for lawmakers. One that passed requires school boards create written policies barring discrimination on the basis of gender expression, including the use of a student’s preferred name.
Last year, four student proposals advanced through both the House and the Senate to become law, with teens inspiring the development of a disordered eating prevention program in the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the launch of a state task force charged with exploring school discipline policies and studying disproportionate rates of discipline among some groups of students.
The youth organization is now 16 years old, and while members from its younger years have long since grown, some of the issues they brought to the attention of lawmakers haven’t: teen suicide, mental health struggles and the need for better job opportunities.
“From the very start, they didn’t pick low-hanging fruit,” said former Republican State Sen. Ellen Stuart Roberts, who carried the bill that formed the organization in 2008. “That’s why some of these issues are still on the table. They picked things that are top of mind for students today.”
“On the right side of history”
Stuart Roberts, a mother of two teens at the time she sponsored the legislation, said she saw a pressing need to bridge two disparate generations.
“It had been a long time since (many legislators) had been in high school,” she said. “There was a lot of discussion about education, but there wasn’t that many avenues for young people to step into that space and express their opinions.”
So Stuart Roberts carved out that space herself, providing a place where students like Christiansen can give their generation a louder voice in the chambers.
“Youth have always been on the right side of history,” Christiansen said. “Youth are our visionaries. They have so much wisdom and expertise, and it would be such a waste to not listen to that expertise. The more we listen to young people, the better the world gets.”
Christiansen, who pushed for state support for higher education for teens coming from foster care, was part of COYAC her junior and senior years of high school, stepping up as co-chair of the organization her senior year. After a childhood spent writing letters to lawmakers — including one sent to former President Barack Obama advocating for the end of the death penalty — Christiansen found a more direct way to communicate with lawmakers through the legislative organization.
She collaborated with former State Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat who sponsored the bill and brought her own motivation to help the state’s foster youth.
Christiansen kept lawmakers grounded, reiterating what she saw as a dire need to create more of a safety net for students in foster care figuring out life after graduation, Zenzinger said. And when legislators behind the bill considered dramatically scaling it back, Christiansen and a woman who was placed in foster care as a teen and offered COYAC and lawmakers firsthand input, reminding them why foster kids desperately needed their help.
“It was so gutsy,” Zenzinger said, noting that COYAC students and lawmakers decided to rewrite the bill in a way that would boost financial aid for students in foster care rather than diminish it, all while uncertain of whether it would pass.
“I believe that the team of students really helped shine a light and keep us true to the purpose, and we ended up with a much better policy at the end of the day,” Zenzinger said.
Driving change through COYAC pointed Christiansen down a road that has continued to nudge her toward a career redesigning the legal system a step at a time. She recently earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley — focusing on legal studies, race and the law — and next is attending law school at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Christiansen said of her days in COYAC. “I learned that we can work within an oppressive system to help each other until we can abolish those systems because the legal system that allowed us to pass this bill is the same legal system that disenfranchises foster students in the first place. So it is helpful when we can use these systems to help each other, but ultimately we need to remember that these systems put us here.”
Other student participants like Sidd Nareddy, 18, have learned a hard lesson the hard way: Passing legislation demands persistence.
Nareddy, who lives in Westminster and just graduated from Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, worked with some of his peers in advocating to expand the number of mental health professionals in Colorado schools. One bill they proposed would have provided loan repayment for mental health professionals practicing in parts of the state where students struggle to access help for mental health challenges.
That bill failed, but it didn’t deter Nareddy, who had a hand in two pieces of legislation that were signed into law last year.
“With this most recent piece of mental health legislation that we worked on, ultimately even though it wasn’t successful in this legislative session I think the really important thing that happens is the conversations behind this,” he said, “because we raised the issue to the legislators and the community organizations around us and ultimately brought it to people’s radar and there are many people who know about this issue that are now more aware about it.”
Nareddy, who plans to study biomedical engineering and public policy at Brown University, added that other COYAC participants hope to revise the legislation and revive lawmakers’ interest in a future session. Lawmakers like Stuart Roberts see that level of persistence as necessary in tackling some of the state’s toughest issues.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t necessarily been able to fix things in the way that we all strive to do, but to keep working on it is critical and raising those issues is very important,” Stuart Roberts said. “I know as a legislator in the past, there’s so many competing topics of interest and the students are really keeping some of these front and center. And perhaps they’re not solvable, but the state can and should have an interest in them.”
The success of the organization and its students, however, amounts to more than the number of bills they see land on the governor’s desk. The lessons they carry from the Capitol — and the ones they teach lawmakers — matter just as much, Stuart Roberts said.
“To me, it’s not necessarily a notch in the belt for every bill they’ve gotten passed,” she said. “It’s the fact that they’ve gotten together as a group of all different backgrounds and tried to find common ground.”