Three New Family Voice Projects Launch Across Colorado

With grants and guidance from the Division of Child Welfare and Foster America’s support, three new family voice projects launched in late 2024 and early 2025.  The Four County Collaborative (Baca, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Prowers) and Morgan County designed and launched Family Voice Councils this year with the purpose of getting community input. In Jefferson County, family voice has been integrated into their internal decision-making process. These efforts help Colorado to realize its commitment to ensuring that families with lived experience guide and shape the systems that serve them.

“Our job was to make sure we had all the right people around the table and that took a lot of time identifying what it was the leaders wanted to see happen on the back side of building and launching a family voice councils, along with solidifying the bylaws and a charter. We used the Compass for Family Voice Councils and brought all the right people to the table and started asking questions like: ‘How often do they meet? Who’s going to lead it? What kind of goals do you have? What kind of metrics are you going to follow to know whether or not your family voice work is having an impact?’” said Angela Lytle, Colorado Site Director for Foster America, who worked with the counties on their family voice work for two years.

The four county collaborative’s eight-member council is made up of citizens of the four-county collaborative of Baca, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Prowers counties. The diverse group of members took a 10-week Family Leadership Training Institute (FLTI) course designed to train individuals to do advocacy work. Launched in April of 2025, the primary goal of this council is to improve the process of finding mental health, public health, child welfare, medical and other resources in the community for both English and Spanish-speaking residents. 

“We are really blessed with administrators who are attuned with our citizens and their hearts are in the right places. The directors went to a workshop and learned about family voice and thought it was a great idea. Let’s ask our own people because every area is different. They asked, ‘What are the things families are struggling with and what can we do to help them?’ We have a lot of collaboration and most of the major resources cover most of all four counties,” said Sharon Mauch, Family Advocate for the Collaborative Management Program, who leads the four-county collaborative family voice council.

The Morgan County Family Voice Council launched in May of 2025 and currently has four members who have also done an FLTI program through the Morgan County Family Resource Center. Morgan County’s Family Voice Council is open to the public so citizens can come and voice their concerns or ask questions and the council can bring that input back to the department. 

“You can’t fix something if you are biased and only know your department. Bringing in people who actually use the services helps to mend the relationship with the community and various departments. It can also educate the community, as they don’t necessarily know all the community resources and services that are available to them. I hope as it evolves as more people show up and more people will start connecting with the council and bring in concerns or even share successes. It can really help to mend some of those relationships,” said Elaine Horton, the Family Voice Council Coordinator who also runs a non-profit in the community that works with at-risk youth. 

In Jefferson County family voice has been integrated into their consensus-based decision-making process where 15% of the decisions are made by management and 85% are made by committee. Beginning in October of 2024, the county currently has four family advisors who have lived experience in child welfare. The family advisors sit on their seventeen-member steering committee, along with the management team and five co-chairs of the work stream committees who meet once a month to make decisions about work culture and work processes. Jefferson County employees and family advisors can choose to be a part of any of 30 committees that are part of the county’s eight different work streams.

“We are making decisions that we think will be meaningful for families but we don’t know that unless we get input from families. We can make a decision and the family advisors can come in and say that is not going to work and wouldn’t be helpful. They came into the poverty committee and reinvigorated the committee with new ideas to work on,” said Natalie Mall, Associate Director with Children, Youth and Families and Adult Protection in Jefferson County.