Welcome to What’s Your Agenda? Colorado Politics’ weekly publication of trade association priorities for the state’s 2025 legislative session.

Founded in 1919, Save the Children is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the health, education, and safety of children around the world. Save the Children Action Network is the organization’s political advocacy arm.

“We are a bipartisan organization that works to support children in the US and globally, because they cannot vote and they cannot give money to political candidates,” said Ana Bustamante, Save the Children’s Colorado state manager. “So we’re stepping in and through a combination of grassroots activism, messaging, and candidate engagement, we build relationships with the community of policymakers to increase investments in expanding access to early childhood education, preventing child hunger, and protecting children around the world from harm.”

In their own words, here are the Save the Children’s top priority bills for this session. 

Note: some responses have been edited for clarity.

Investing in early education

The state budget is on everyone’s mind; there is a $700 million deficit, so we’re going to have to see cuts. What we want to make sure is that we protect and invest in the Colorado Childcare Assistance Program and Universal Preschool. We really appreciate that the governor has made a big emphasis on early education in the budget. In his new budget update, he actually increased the funding for these programs. 

SNAP Restaurant Meals Program

This bill has not been introduced yet, but there is a concept. Right now, you can only use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), for certain products, like cold ingredients at the grocery store. There’s a thing called the Restaurant Meals Program that allows SNAP recipients to use their benefits for warm meals. We know that for some people, like unhoused people or people with certain disabilities, cooking is not easy. You need to have a whole kitchen and be able to have the time and ability to cook. So the idea of the Restaurant Meals Program is to make sure that SNAP benefits are having the best impact they can have and making sure folks can use them. 

SNAP is a federal program, but the Restaurant Meals Program will be run by the state. It has already been implemented in other states, so it’s not a completely new concept. 

Funding for Healthy School Meals

Colorado voters passed the Healthy School Meals for All ballot initiative with pretty strong support. It’s super exciting; kids are getting breakfast and lunch for free, which helps not only in keeping kids fed, but it has been shown to increase attendance and performance.

The program also provides higher wages for cafeteria workers, grants to improve cafeterias, and provides students with fresh, healthy food from Colorado produces. Unfortunately because of inflation and because every single school participated in the program, there aren’t enough funds to cover everything. So we’re looking into different options for that right now; there’s big support from the Joint Budget Committee to do a TABOR retainment ballot measure, so we’ll definitely be supporting that and exploring different avenues on how we can make sure every piece of the program will be covered.