Since taking the reins at ProgressNow Colorado just over two years ago, Sara Loflin steered the venerable progressive advocacy organization through a general election that saw Democrats retain control of Colorado government and boost the party’s majorities to historic levels in the General Assembly.

The results punctuated a two-decade reversal of the state’s once solidly Republican politics that coincides with ProgressNow’s tenure pulling pranks and organizing progressive voices.

Founded in 2003, the organization celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this month at Casa Bonita, packing the landmark Lakewood eatery with a crowd of about 600 supporters featuring most of the state’s leading Democrats.

The organization was one of a slew of left-leaning advocacy groups launched at around the same time, though its original cohorts, Colorado Media Matters and Colorado Ethics Watch, have long since disbanded.

The multi-pronged approach, part of a plan to move Colorado’s political climate to the left, was hatched by a group of wealthy donors and overseen by former Colorado State University President Al Yates. The group, later dubbed the Gang of Four, included Pat Stryker, Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges and Jared Polis – at the time a young tech millionaire on the State Board of Education, who later served five terms in Congress and won reelection last year to a second term as governor.

Before becoming ProgressNow’s executive director, Loflin founded and, for six years, ran the  League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans. The environmental advocacy group, known as LOGIC, played a key role in the legislature’s 2019 adoption of Senate Bill 181, a sweeping bill that gave local governments the power to regulate fossil fuel development and required that the state’s oil and gas commission regulate – instead of “foster” – energy extraction.

“The idea was,” Loflin told Colorado Politics, “we could make transformational change by elevating the stories of people living with oil and gas.”

It’s an approach she said she brings to ProgressNow Colorado.

“I hope we can continue to move the progressive needle forward by working to tell people’s stories and work to push, from a public standpoint, that as progressives we are responsive to the needs of the community, their hurts, their goods and their bads,” she said.

“It’s about finding ways to be responsive and forward-thinking about everyday experiences.”

Loflin grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Her father was a South Vietnamese refugee who fled the war-torn country when Saigon fell in the mid-1970s and was sponsored in the U.S. by her mother’s family.

“My family has seen firsthand what it looks like when you get left behind,” Loflin said. “I learned from an early age that things like democracy are not free. They’re worth fighting for, and it takes vigilance to protect them.”

Loflin attended a small college in Iowa and then cut her teeth in the early 2000s working on affordable housing issues in the Twin Cities. She moved to Colorado and worked with the Service Employees International Union. Before founding LOGIC, her organizing work included stints at Progressive Majority, Clean Water Action and Vote for America.

Loflin was elected to the town of Erie’s Board of Trustees in April 2020 and has been the fast-growing exurb’s mayor pro tem since April 2022. She serves on the board of the state’s Energy/Mineral Impact Assistance Fund, a program that distributes funding to communities affected by the energy and mining industries.

Loflin’s interview with Colorado Politics has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Colorado Politics: You’ve been at the helm of ProgressNow Colorado now for, what, just over two years?

Sara Loflin: I have, but I was not anticipating when I took this job on that three months later I would be diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. As of today, I’m cancer free. In December of 2021, my doctors and I discovered – they think it was as big as a six-centimeter tumor. And so I spent all of 2022 doing my job and being a mom and doing my job as Erie trustee and fighting breast cancer. Six months of chemo, surgery and six weeks of radiation. So, I’m looking forward to 2024, where I won’t be juggling that into an election year schedule!

CP: That’s good to hear – congratulations on being cancer-free. You passed another major milestone this month, right? ProgressNow just turned 20.

Loflin: I think it was first filed on the 15th of September of 2003, but, as you know, it takes a month or so to get these things up and running. So, this is a big milestone. And Colorado looks a little different than it did 20 years ago.

CP: It sure does. What brought you to this position?

Loflin: In 2021, I was about ready to move on from LOGIC. I had done all I could do and had brought some real success to a new model of environmental advocacy and policy change. I don’t think I ever necessarily realized it was communications until somebody said, “You really ought to apply for that ProgressNow job,” and I said I don’t know if that’s a fit. And they pushed a little bit and said, “Tell me about what it is that moved you to start LOGIC?”

And I said, after six years in the environmental movement and sitting in legislative committees testifying on all of the big scary environmental factoids and then going through the Blue Ribbon Panel in 2014 that then-Gov. (John) Hickenlooper did, I realized there might be something to people actually telling their stories of how oil and gas was impacting them to getting somewhere in oil and gas policy changes.

Turned out in 2019, it actually worked well after going through the rulemaking. And having somebody say, “You’d be doing a lot of what you did with LOGIC, except on a whole broad base of issues.” So, what excites me is being able to work with folks who make amazing spokespersons or whose lived experience makes all the difference when it comes to considering a policy change. And bringing that community-based, grassroots-based approach to changing the narrative, changing policy, changing the political landscape in Colorado.

CP: Since you took over, what do you count as major successes for ProgressNow for the progressive movement in Colorado?

Loflin: The “No Way O’Dea” Colorado bus tour was one. We actually got a bus and had it wrapped with “No Way O’Dea,” and we ran around Colorado filming folks talking about (2022 Republican U.S. Senate nominee) Joe O’Dea. This was when Michael Bennett’s polling wasn’t looking quite so great, and general national polling for Democrats wasn’t looking quite so bright for 2022. And we were able to help define him as an anti-abortion candidate who, for all intents and purposes, was not that far off of a Cory Gardner or a Donald Trump. And no, Joe O’Dea and Cory Gardner were probably not as verbose as a Donald Trump, but would have been right there when it came to policy changes or votes.

CP: And O’Dea lost by a wide margin to Michael Bennett.

Loflin: We have also been there to help set the narrative as a supportive organization, helping to amplify our partners who support abortion rights. We were a organizer and a major supporter of the Dobbs decision rallies and a lot of the post-Roe fallout that happened. I was really proud of that rally that we helped organize with our partners and kind of took a backseat or behind-the-scenes space in helping to organize. That was one of our bigger moments.

I live for some of the more subtle moments, and one of my personal favorites was when the Republicans in the Colorado state House did a bill on voting machines. It was a bill from Mark Baisley, who suggested at one point that we start wrapping voting machines in tin foil. So, we sent a staff person to the Capitol in a tinfoil hat, and he was amazed he didn’t get kicked out of the committee room. But what was really funny was a Republican legislator actually retweeted a photo of him in his tinfoil hat, and I remember saying, “Exactly!”

I still consider myself a student of the high visibility pieces. One of the ones that I count as one of our bigger accomplishments in 2022 were the Kuhlman Files that we launched, all about Jan Kuhlman presiding over the Stargate Academy school board. (Editor’s note: Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann was one of four Republicans who sought the nomination in the 8th Congressional District last year. She finished in second place, behind state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, who lost in November to Democrat Yadira Caraveo.)

We did a video, and then we did put a tiny bit of money behind social media buys. It wasn’t a lot, but we generated about 6,500 to 7,000 views on the Kuhlman Files website. And it was awfully close to her loss margin, right? I was able to spread that organically. Part of it was through my Adams County connections around oil and gas, tagging friends I’d made who were from Thornton or Commerce City that were concerned about Jan Kuhlman as a possible GOP candidate. And then when Barb Kirkmeyer started talking about Yadira Caraveo supporting fentanyl and decriminalizing that, our press release said just because you tell a lie over and over again doesn’t make it true, and Kyle Clark picked it up.

CP: ProgressNow has been known for its pranks – unconventional ways of getting attention – over the years. Do you have some planned for the next year?

Loflin: Presuming all things remain equal, I believe we will be doing a fair bit of visibility in the 3rd Congressional District, as well in as the 8th Congressional District.

CP: ProgressNow isn’t the scrappy group of internet-based agitators it was 20 years ago – as was evident at the Casa Bonita celebration, it’s pretty much the establishment now. How does it stay fresh while maturing as an organization?

Loflin: When ProgressNow started, the state was pretty much red, right? And we were scrappy – defining candidates by silly videos. How we’ve matured is we started taking on some issues – abortion and climate change, affordable housing, TABOR, some of those pieces. I’m an old organizer who knows how to get people’s stories told. When I was doing oil and gas, I always knew that Chase (Woodruff) wanted to talk to the people who are sad about the impact oil and gas was having. And I always knew that Mark Jaffe wanted to talk about all the ins and outs of the law, so I found a good deputy director who prided himself on being a retired – or a recovering – attorney, who could go through all the machinations of SB 181 with Mark.

For me in Colorado at this moment, it’s about telling the story of the soccer moms. If we’re looking at (Proposition) HH, it’s about talking about and relating to the fact that you buy a house and it’s gone up 90% in value in five years. So, you’re not just talking about whether or not you can afford the mortgage, but is your house unaffordable because of the (property) taxes. And you still love your neighborhood school, and you still love the community you live in.

And there are elements in Colorado – in Elizabeth and in St. Vrain Valley and even in Boulder Valley at this point – that thrive on a PhD from Google in the latest conspiracy theory. So, I think part of it is dispelling some of the disinformation that’s out there. But I also think it’s being able to say things when you have a Lauren Boebert, who gets herself kicked out of the Buell Theatre and the next day is spewing about immigrants at the border and Hamas and Joe Biden, and half the time you wonder if she knows what the heck she’s even talking about. It’s also pointing out that people like Lauren Boebert are unfit to run a business, let alone serve in Congress.

So, I think it’s some of both, right? I think it’s continuing some of the antics that really point out some of the things that Lauren Boebert does, or the weirdness where Kevin Buck for about five minutes appeared on Matt Gaetz’s “Gaetz Eight” letter and then came out with a statement that he didn’t actually sign on to it.

It’s about pointing some of those things out. But then from the other side, it’s about making listen to the sounds. And making sure that when we talk about making progressive policy or advancing progress in Colorado, that we are making sure that real Coloradans are front and center to the story of why.

CP: What does it mean to be a progressive in Colorado these days?

Loflin: For a suburban mom like me, it means caring about the world that my kid grows up in. It means making sure that my nieces have the freedom to make their own choices with their own bodies, whether that fight is at the state level or at the national level. It means making sure that the community my kid lives in is one that is supportive and caring and accepting and welcoming to all.

It means that, but it also means grappling with the fact that the pandemic was scary and, in the aftermath of it, yes, there is some inflation happening. There has been tremendous inflation happening, frankly, for Coloradans, and that’s no more evident anywhere as it is in our property taxes. My home value in little Erie, Colorado, went up about 85% from 2018 to this past year. How do we start to answer the questions, how to grapple with that?

It means really addressing affordable housing if we want to make sure that our kids and parents can live in and nearby the communities that we live in. It means that, from a population perspective, ensuring that there are housing options that fit the spectrum of Colorado ages and Colorado communities.

Being a progressive means that we are ready to continue to stand up for things like marriage equality and affordable health care. Affordable health care has taken on a whole new meaning for me. For me, that’s what it looks like. It means standing up for workers. It means standing up for the things we’ve always stood for – and pushing to continue making progress.