On Friday, August 20, the PLAN Core Team convened for their regularly scheduled meeting and began conversations around establishing a draft of policy priorities for 2022!

PLAN Core Team members lifted emerging policy priorities and other areas of focus from their own organizations looking to 2022, and identified alignment between their organizations.

They then used that alignment and other identified areas of collective work, policy barriers lifted from other Partnership leadership tables, and Partnership Community

Well-Being Data Domains to develop a rough list of priorities for the Backbone Team to

More to come—stay tuned!

Want more information about the Policy & Legislative Advisory Network and who is involved? Click HERE. 

Several Rocky Mountain Partnership members were featured in a recent Washington Post article that contextualizes the recently released 2020 Census data!

The article is headlined "A Colorado county offers a glimpse of America’s future," and uses Adams County, Colo. as an example of what the recent Census data brought to life about how our nation is changing.

The U.S. Census Bureau has released the official 2020 census data, providing a detailed snapshot of today's United States population, and revealing how the nation has changed since the last full census 10 years ago. The new report provides numbers of people and households, along with race and ethnicity data, down to small neighborhood units, giving the most granular look at the population in 10 years. It also provides data for the political reapportionment and redistricting that happens every 10 years and give Congress an accurate count of the population to be used for congressional funding allocations. Colorado had the 7th fastest growth among states in the past decade (8th including the District of Columbia), by percentage growth, based on the census bureau's state population figures released earlier this year. The state grew by nearly 800,000 residents, or about 15%. The United States’ population grew by about 7% during the same time.

The Tri-County Board of Health voted to require students ages 2 - 11 and teachers and day care staff to wear masks in schools throughout Adams, Douglas and Arapahoe counties. The mandate for younger children and their teachers or day care workers begins today, August 23, according to the motion shown during the virtual meeting. Counties can opt out of the order, but school districts cannot. The vote came a day after the board took 90 minutes of public comment during a virtual meeting that was attended by more than 2,000 people. It also follows about 24 hours after Jefferson County Public Health issued a mask mandate for all of its 84,000 students as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are increasingly on the rise. In a summary of the public comment responses released by the Tri-County Health Department, 62% of more than 12,000 respondents in the three-county region “do not support masking in schools under any circumstance.”

Colorado is ready to take in Afghan refugees and those granted visas for their work with the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan, Gov. Jared Polis told President Joe Biden on Wednesday. Polis urged the president “to act quickly to evacuate and resettle eligible Afghans as there are lives at stake.” He singled out bureaucratic delays as particularly unacceptable. “While processes are important, I fear that placing paperwork before people will cause additional harm and loss of life, and I am confident that your Administration can balance expediency with fidelity to our immigration policies and procedures,” the governor wrote.

The Biden administration has approved a significant and permanent increase in the levels of food stamp assistance available to needy families—the largest single increase in the program’s history. Starting in October, average benefits for food stamps (officially known as the SNAP program) will rise more than 25 percent above pre-pandemic levels. The increased assistance will be available indefinitely to all 42 million SNAP beneficiaries. The aid boost is being packaged as a major revision of the USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan. In concrete terms, the average monthly per-person benefits will rise from $121 to $157.

Adam Burg, Senior Advisor, Legislative and Government Affairs, Adams County Government

Kayah Swanson, Senior Director of Policy & Advocacy, RMP Backbone

Matthew La Crue, Managing Director, Dentons

PLAN Co-Champion

Ryan McCoy, Executive Director, Front Range Community College Foundation | President, Westminster Public Schools Board of Education

PLAN Co-Champion

We've gotta say it: This information is subject to change. In addition, some updates may be sourced from organizations that have read limits or limits on how many articles you can access in a given time period.

Rocky Mountain Partnership | rmpartnership.org