Meet Our New Executive Director of Community Partnerships

The Colorado Trust, a foundation dedicated to creating fair and equal opportunities for Coloradans to lead healthy lives, has hired Jodeen Olguín-Tayler as the executive director of Community Partnerships, The Colorado Trust’s largest grantmaking strategy.

Prior to returning home to Colorado, Jodeen Olguín-Tayler held leadership roles in global and national advocacy organizations. From 2019-21, Jodeen served on the global leadership team for B Lab, the world’s largest network of certified benefit corporations. While serving as vice president of Demos, a leading national racial-equity public policy organization, she led a team of lawyers, policy experts, campaign strategists and registered lobbyists to advance campaign finance reforms, protect voting rights, and introduce state and federal legislation in support of reproductive justice and eliminating student debt. While serving as campaigns director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the largest women-of-color membership organization in the country, Olguín-Tayler managed civic engagement, policy advocacy and organizing campaigns that secured state and federal level policy wins. During the first term of the Obama administration, as deputy field director for MoveOn.org, she supervised staff across 36 states and trained the team that led over 3,250 direct actions and lobby visits in support of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Olguín-Tayler is a sought-after advisor, trainer and strategist who has partnered with and co-founded many innovative social justice initiatives. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the 2012 financial crises, Jodeen served as one of the lead facilitators for a political education program that trained over 60,000 people to participate in direct actions. As an early collaborator with the Movement for Black Lives, in 2015 she supported their development and release of a federal and state-scaled public policy agenda (the Vision for Black Lives) and translated it into Spanish. She has served on both national and state leadership bodies for the Working Families Party, was a founding member of Mijente, and co-founded #GOPHandsOffMe, an initiative that successfully registered over 35,000 survivors of sexual assault to vote in the 2016 elections, and she later participated on the national advisory committee for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Olguín-Tayler’s commitment to connecting racial justice organizing and direct action to public policy campaigns led her to launch the Inclusive Democracy Project, a partnership between public policy organizations, national philanthropic institutions, 35 statewide grassroots organizing groups and six national organizing networks.

Olguín-Tayler chairs the board of directors for the Movement Voter Fund, which was responsible for moving over $130 million to frontline grassroots organizing during the 2020 election cycle. In spring 2021, she co-managed the Amalgamated Foundation’s Democracy (Re)Investment Fund, an initiative to shift practices in corporate philanthropy to support voting rights and grassroots power-building. She advises the Community Power-Building Fund and previously served on the advisory boards of the Climate Justice Fund, Asian American Civic Engagement Fund, the Chicana Empowerment Fund and the Partnership Fund. From 2012-16, she was a national fellow in the NoVo Foundation’s Move to End Violence program, an initiative to transform the field working to end gender-based violence and sexual assault to center racial equity and survivor leadership. She also served as program officer for the civil society program at the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and in 2017 was honored by Hispanics in Philanthropy as a national “Líder en Philanthropy.”

As a proud Chicana with familial roots on land now designated as southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, her family’s 500+ years of resilience stewarding land, water, language and cultural traditions are an inheritance and legacy that guided Olguín-Tayler to return to Colorado. It is this resilience and inheritance that informs her work and commitment to supporting the leadership of communities to build and shift economic, cultural and political power to be more equitably distributed. As someone intimately familiar with structural barriers to equity and inclusion, she believes her own leadership has been made possible by inter-generational mentorship, deep relationships with frontline communities with Indigenous cultural traditions, early access to bilingual public education, reproductive health care, and caregiving support from domestic workers. Accordingly, hallmarks of Olguín-Tayler’s institutional leadership include providing strong mentorship and investments in leadership pipelines, as well as building inclusive mission-driven organizational cultures with internal and external commitments to advancing equity.

“We are thrilled that Jodeen has come aboard to oversee the strategic direction and operations of the Community Partnerships strategy,” said Ned Calonge, MD, MPH, president and chief executive officer of The Colorado Trust. “Her wide-ranging experience as a nationally recognized expert on organizing, diversity and inclusion, and building social-change infrastructure, will be vital to the long-term success of our largest and most comprehensive funding strategy.”

About The Colorado Trust 
The Colorado Trust is a foundation dedicated to ensuring all Coloradans have the opportunity to thrive. We partner with people and organizations across Colorado that are working to make positive changes in their communities. We provide funding and other resources so that all people have the power to make decisions that improve their lives and the lives of their neighbors. The Colorado Trust also believes local and statewide policies should have a positive impact on people’s well-being. We provide grants and support to organizations that advocate for policies that ensure all Coloradans live healthier lives. For more information, visit www.coloradotrust.org.