Courtesy of Ellie Greenberg

In the latter decades of the 20th century, I wrote many articles and made many presentations about what I believed would drive our society in the 21st century. I developed a three-part concept that provided an umbrella for my vision of the new millennium: demography, technology, and the global economy. As I look at this idea now, more than 20 years later, I must say that I was correct in my predictions. (However, I did not go so far as to predict the deep economic recession that we and the rest of the globe are currently experiencing.)

In 1986, just as Roy Romer was elected governor of Colorado, two colleagues (State Senator Martha Ezzard and a banker’s wife, Susan Kirk) and I were focusing on women’s status and needs. At that time, there was not a single agency or office in our state government that addressed the needs of women, even though women comprised more than half of the state’s population. The old Colorado Commission on the Status of Women had long been “sunsetted,” and the kinds of social issues that it had addressed—abortion, choice, balancing work and family—were no longer the focus of public attention. Even though those matters had certainly not been resolved, and still haven’t, the politics of the day required that we turn our attention to more mainstream issues, like the economy.

So, instead of proposing that a new Commission on the Status of Women be established, we proposed that a Women’s Economic Development Council be created, and that a Colorado Women’s Business Office be opened and staffed. We were determined that the economics of women’s lives become part of the growing state dialogue about economic development. This proposal came after we agreed to lead a statewide effort to study the issues and present our findings, which we did in a formal hearing with Governor Romer in the elegant and newly refurbished Legislative Council hearing room. We had hardly completed our presentation when Romer rose and announced that he would establish the Colorado Women’s Economic Development Council by executive order. He then proceeded to introduce the first director of the new Women’s Business Office, and we were off and running.

The next eight years were very busy and exciting. Martha paid attention to the political issues, Susan focused on the financial issues, and I played the chairperson’ s role and provided the intellectual base for our strategies. The governor appointed a bright, diverse, geographically representational, productive group of women, and a few men, of various ages to the Council. We met monthly and were soon immersed in dozens of activities, including a “Fast Track” women’s business development course, which gave women an opportunity to write a business plan and start up new businesses all over the state. We held the “graduations” at the Governor’s Mansion, which heightened the prestige of those events and ensured that the governor and Economic Development team were likely to attend.