The League of Women Voters of Boulder County on Sunday will celebrate its 90th birthday. The county chapter technically was formed in 2007 with the merging of the Boulder and Longmont groups, but the Boulder chapter, the first in the state, got its start in 1931 setting up cause to virtually toast nine decades.
“Merging all the cities, Boulder, Longmont, Lafayette, and Louisville, it really helps us with community outreach, voter registration drives and consistency and certainly gives us more power in creating actionable items and change at the county level,” Mandy Nuku, operations director of LWVBC, said.
The Boulder County chapter is now the largest in the state, with just under 300 members. The goal of the LWVBC is to inform voters to create a more “inclusive and participatory democracy” at both the national and local levels.
“We are a good governance organization. We believe in voting rights and we never endorse a political party. Help people and educate people, that’s what we’re about,” said Ruth Stelmer, Longmont resident and former LWVBC president.
Stelmer became involved with LWVBC after retiring from a career in community health care and nutrition. After realizing the strongest point of change in the community was through policy making, she joined the LWVBC board and got to work.
Stelmer also joined the state board and worked on strategic planning for the organization.
“If you’re working at a small nonprofit, it takes every possible skill you have and it also takes some skills that you didn’t have and need or want to develop,” she said.
Nuku, an employee for three years, also made her way to the state board.
“We’ve really moved from a totally volunteer organization to one that’s more outwardly facing community oriented and a true 501(c) in that we’re fundraising, grant writing, and doing those kinds of things in the community,” Nuku said.
The community impact of the organization has not stopped despite the coronavirus pandemic creating barriers to community outreach. Switching to virtual meetings and forums actually made its activities more accessible, Nuku said. In March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the league had to move a forum online — 300 people attended and more than 5,000 viewed the recorded program.
One of the recent goals of the organization has been language equity, especially for Spanish speakers, Nuku said. LWVBC partnered with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition to offer Longmont and Colorado ballot issue presentations in Spanish.
At the state level, the league also advocated for Colorado to remain in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which the state joined in 2019 and its continued participation in was approved by state voters in November.
“Now we need to get a few more states on the board and we will actually have a national popular vote for the president and vice president of the United States,” Stelmer said.
The organization’s 90th birthday event will celebrate the impact the League of Women Voters has made in the past near century, but also call attention to where the league could have amplified voices earlier on in the organization's history. The frank conversation about diversity, inclusion and representation will add a new element not part of previous celebrations, Nuku said.
Sunday’s event will include community members and leaders. The keynote speaker will be Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins, the first and only Black board president of the League of Women Voters, who served from 1998 to 2002. Author of “The Untold Story of the Women of Color in the League of Women Voters,” Jefferson-Jenkins will talk about where Black women have been historically left out of the conversation on women’s voting rights.
Specifically, Jefferson-Jenkins will speak to the “shift in recognition of being proud of all the accomplishments of the 19th Amendment, but also recognizing that (it) actually only gave white women the means of their right to vote,” Nuku said.
The celebration, for which registration is $30, or $60 to receive a signed copy of Jefferson-Jenkins’ book, starts at 4 p.m. and is slated to run an hour. Register here.
Nuku urged community members to attend to learn more about the league, its work and what lies ahead.
“We believe in the power of women to create a more perfect democracy,” she said.
