Lakewood City Council member Rebekah Stewart announced on Tuesday that she’s running for the Democratic nomination in the open House District 30 seat.

Stewart, the first board-certified music therapist elected to office in Colorado, said she wants to bring her experience advocating for the disability and health care communities to the legislature.

“Every day, I’ve tried to wake up and be the best representative of my community’s needs and values that I possibly can be,” she told Colorado Politics. “I’m feeling a lot of excitement to take this next step and run for the state House to continue that work of lifting up the voices and the values and needs of my community, but at the state Capitol.”

The Jefferson County-based district is currently represented by House Speaker Pro Tem Chris deGruy Kennedy, D-Lakewood, who is term-limited.

Two other Democrats have already filed to run for the seat, including Kyra deGruy Kennedy, the incumbent’s wife, and Rhiannon Wenning.

The heavily Democratic district covers eastern portions of Lakewood and Edgewater. Kennedy won reelection to a fourth term in November by a wide margin, defeating Republican nominee Russ Carter by just over 30 percentage points.

In 2021, Stewart became the first candidate to unseat an incumbent member of Lakewood’s city council in 16 years, winning the nonpartisan election by nearly 20 percentage points.

She said her background has been an asset finding solutions on “really tricky issues” on city council, including removing barriers to affordable housing in the suburban city.

“In my work, it didn’t matter who my clients voted for or what their political views were,” Stewart said. “It was my job to show up and work with them and do what I could to help them achieve what they wanted in life and to have the opportunity to have the best life and to thrive. That’s a huge reason why I see the need for more folks from people-focused professions to be part of the discourse in political spaces.”

Stewart pointed to a choir she founded and directed whose members had suffered strokes on the left side of their brain, resulting in aphasia, a condition that makes it difficult to speak.

“Often what we see is that folks lose the ability to speak fluently but retain the ability to sing words fluently, because music is processed through a slightly different pathway in the brain,” she said. “So one skill can be lost while the other is retained. What we would do is work on being able to use that skill that they still had to build new pathways in the brian to build around the roadblock in the brain in order to more effectively communicate again.”

Added Stewart: “The choir that I directed was really a celebration of those strengths that folks had. I think that’s a testament to the power of music to really help people in a concrete way.”

Stewart said the choir, which had the opportunity to perform in the Colorado House chamber, embodies the approach she hopes to bring to the statehouse.

“Music therapy is a creative solution to rehab,” she said. “What we need are creative solutions and people who are wiling to think outside of the box to solve problems.”