The biggest advice I'd give to the next generation is have fun, because fun allows you to learn and it keeps you happy.

And I think that that we sometimes miss that by doing other things and oh, that is a really good one.

My inspiration came from just wanting to know everything.

I was extremely curious as a child, and my mother said that all the time.

Curiosity, you know, as I grew up.

So I wanted to know everything.

She will be in a kindergarten classroom and have kids surrounding and the next minute.

So go walk into the congressional hearing and sit down and convince people.

I attended a meeting, and there was this little woman in the room who commanded everyone's attention and respect.

I can't tell you what meeting it was, but I knew that that woman was the center of all of it.

Was in my late 20s, and I wanted to do something good in the world.

Right.

And the person I kept running across was this little bitty woman who seemed very well anchored in the communities that I wanted to be a part of, in a way.

And she came from those communities.

It's wow.

How lucky.

You know, am I, and my siblings to, you know, have seen it and just been able to breathe it in every day because that's a part of who we are and what we do.

You can't tell the story of early childhood education without Anna Jo.

A lot of people come and go.

She stayed there 50 years.

She truly is the through line.

I don't care what your political beliefs are.

We all want what's best for children.

And that is Anna Jo's entry into the door.

These ideas aren't just kind of floating out there.

These ideas affect real people.

I would not be Doctor Roy without having affordable child care, and she was responsible for ensuring that that was available to myself and many other families.

It teaches us that we have the power to impact change.

Thank you Anna Jo for your your relentless effort over many decades.

You were ahead of your time advocating for universal preschool and early childhood decades ago.

We're finally catching up as a state to to where you've been for many years.

We have this amazing woman, this legacy in this legend, right here in Colorado.

We are so fortunate that Anna Jo has kept her papers over the years.

The collection is a combination of her professional, but also her personal papers.

What I've learned in working with the collection is how much work has really gone into advancing education and the care of children and families in Colorado, and how much Anna Jo has been a part of that, not only from civil rights to what happens in the classroom, to looking at childhood and brain development, but also really how you then advocate for that over time.

How do we honor everything that she's done so that I can take students from this classroom and walk over to show them possibility every day for lessons on the development of children, as well as legislation and how you advocate at work, at home, how you advocate at the Capitol.

This woman is a woman.

She's human like the rest of us.

But look at the life she lived to impact change and let's walk through it.

Anna Jo Garcia was born on the Auraria campus that is the campus that we know it today.

When she was born here in 1934, it was a neighborhood, and it was a neighborhood primarily of Latino families.

And she lived here with her family until she was about age four, in 1952 or 1953, about the time that her first child was born.

Anna Jo comes back to the Auraria neighborhood where her childhood home was.

She came back to that neighborhood in her first career, which was in the Parks and Recreation Department.

And it's an important time as the neighborhood is beginning to change.

It's right before urban renewal and right before her home will become the future Auraria Campus.

This is where I was born.

Of course, it was in the asphalt parking lot at that point in time.

It was a white office building.

It was not really what you would call a house.

That's okay.

Where you live is your home.

And that's where I was born.

And I was not born in a hospital.

Yeah, I had a midwife, and she was a German lady, and there were a lot of German people who lived in this community.

Anyway, this is exciting to know.

This almost is the exact spot.

Maria Mitchell, to me is really a pivotal time for Anna Jo.

She goes the first year of kindergarten, and every day she's coming home early.

She does not want to stay in school.

And this is really when her teacher says to her mom, maybe she's not ready for kindergarten.

And so she repeats kindergarten.

And this is from that time period when she's in kindergarten.

Her second time around with her classmates, she had somebody understand her, what her needs were, what her family's needs were.

And this particular teacher said it was okay.

But also talked about who Maria Mitchell was as an astronomer, as a powerful woman, as somebody who was educated and bettered herself.

Anna Jo Does described herself as a minimalist, growing up with very little.

She was taught to not have too much and to share what she had.

And so for me, this is a great example of what she chose to save and what was very personal and what ultimately, I think influenced so much of who she became.

Growing up in the Catholic faith, you know, she remembers Saint Elizabeth and Saint Cajetans, and it's in the neighborhood and what those places meant to her.

I always lights her up too, you know, to go back through that, that the sort of those early memories.

It was wonderful being able to come to this beautiful church.

And I'm very happy with the people who were here when they made the change to the campus, insisted that this be left here and not taken down.

People come here to ask to have their child's marriage because that's where they got married.

And so this church is very special to me.

When you look at Anna Jo's family history, it's amazing how much her family history really follows Colorado's history and the Colorado Territory and how for many families in Colorado, the border crosses them with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the border changes.

And now you're in the US.

So even that is really pivotal for what happens, for example, to her parents and her father and that legacy of where you're adjusting and your family is changing and you're from one country to a new country, all of those things contribute to what Anna Jo becomes ultimately, and then what she does for children and families.

My mother, particularly, was coming from New Mexico, and my father was born in Trinidad.

And so they were coming to an area that they thought had a lot of different cultures, and they didn't very much feels like home to me, you know, a place where you live, you know, and then come back to it when you go away and come back.

Things just come rushing back to you.

This place, Auraria Campus, MSU Denver and Anna Jo early childhood.

It's a convergence of so much history that brought us to this point in time and place.

I was born here and now I'm old and I worked in early childhood for over 50 years, and I'm going to be able to bring the things that I worked on and so forth.

So it's going to be really interesting, I think, for the students to understand, to walk through the history, but also encourage us in exercising our power as we see what was done.

thinking from the white House on May 18th, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced the first grant under Project Head Start.

It was less than three months ago that we opened a new war front on poverty.

We set out to make certain that povertys children would not be for evermore povertys captives.

We called our program Project Headstart.

Early childhood in the 60s was not really on the map.

I mean, if you consider that headstart, didn't come to Colorado until 1965, the first year it was established.

And it wasn't until headstart that parents started to have a resource to get childcare in order to be in the workforce or to be in school and to improve their own lives.

The people whose children I cared for were all teachers, and they were within a two block range.

So they found out that, you know, I was at home because my kids were little and their kids were a little bigger.

And so, would I like to take care of them?

I said, of course, this would be wonderful, be good for my kids, be good for me.

They were going to pay me a little bit, but something I didn't know at that time was that I was supposed to report that I was doing that, and that was even before licensing.

But you had to report to the city that you were doing that work.

Well, somebody obviously reported for me, and I got a knock on the door saying, May we come in?

I thought, who is this is the city of Denver saying to me that you have to sign these things to say that you're caring for other people's children because there are some dangers involved, you know, that kind of thing.

I said, okay, just not a problem.

But I didn't know that I had to do that.

He had to figure this out.

And if I need to figure this out, probably other people need to understand this as well.

That does move into the 60s when there are so many changes going on in society.

And that explains the context for why Anna Jo is part of the civil rights movement, is part of early education, is part of wanting to make changes.

Legislation wise, all of those things are happening.

So it is this collision of of events in her life that shape.

Then what she goes on to do.

She is an advocate and an advocate is a leader, a person who identifies a problem and says, what do we need to do to solve that problem?

And then not only thinks about what we need to do with organizes, it sees that it happens.

And that's what Anna Jo and Bea were doing together.

Bea and I had seven children, she was just a wonderful mother.

She was really very skilled at helping young people be who they are.

She began that preschool at Mountview, and Anna JoHaynes came in very early in that process, and that's how I got to know Anna Jo When headstart came along, it was a federal program to do what they were already interested in doing in the community.

And they just said, right on, Bea Romer was very instrumental in my getting into this field.

She stopped me one day when I came to pick up Mary and said, I have, I'd like to talk to you.

And I thought, oh, dear, you know.

And so I went and sat down with her for a few minutes and she said, Roy, her husband called her that day and he had gotten a call from the feds, and they were starting a brand new program nationwide.

And was Colorado interested, and Denver in particular.

And so he called me and said, well, do you think we could do this?

Should we do it?

And she said, well, absolutely.

Now, this is a woman who had a large child care center herself, and yet she was so willing to take this on for all the children who didn't have that kind of opportunity.

So she said, Will you help me?

And I said, oh, yes, I'd love to do that.

President Johnson and the US Congress was starting to express and what they later defined as a war on poverty, because poverty was becoming rampant across this country.

President Johnson, with the push from Edward Ziegler, the founding father of headstart, to establish the National Head Start program, they put out a request for proposals to the states, and they were only going to select a few states.

Enter Anna Jo Haynes, who got word of this.

It was summertime in 65.

First summer of Head Start.

The people whose children I cared for were all teachers and so their home with their kids.

So I could absolutely do this.

So I started out by calling everybody I knew and said, would you be willing to help us put this together?

So we had this cadre of women from all over the city of Denver.

It became a really big thing.

People came from everywhere to help us.

She and her colleagues submitted the proposal for Colorado to establish a head start in Colorado, and it was accepted.

And then she established the first head start at her Mile High Montessori facility.

Why should you be interested?

Because these are children who don't get a good start in life.

And you know they need some help.

And so this is a summer of headstart.

That's why it was called headstart.

Let's give them a good head start.

So people came in droves to want to help and were willing to pick up the kids and bring them, in the morning.

And, parents jumped in the car with the person who was coming to bring the children.

And so it became, something that the city was really interested in.

Then when we got to college age, Metro State University was another effort to make up for people who had missed out and needed to have an open door where they could return to work.

So this was not related just to the age of 1 to 5.

It was related.

All human beings that you need to continue through their life.

I went to school with kids who were more talented than I, but they didn't have a chance to explore education beyond high school.

And so when I got in the legislature, I desperately wanted to get an opportunity for young people or adults who had missed the opportunity to educate themselves, train themselves to come back in a person who was working and can take off a year and go to school and go back to the job, come back to school, go back to the job.

It took a institution of higher education and open admission.

It had a different criteria than the restrictive admission of a university.

So I fought very hard to create Metropolitan State University, and we won that battle.

We won by the skin of our teeth.

But, it was in 1965 is a similar battle for headstart, but it was a common theme.

It was a theme of how do you give people access to the educational opportunity they need.

And want.

So let me tell you a little bit my home life.

My father was very involved in politics.

At the end of World War two, he was running a employment agency, small 1 in 1 of the really big buildings in downtown Denver.

He had to close that because it just wasn't working.

And he became a drunk.

And he couldn't provide for us five siblings.

Okay.

I'm the second to the youngest.

Couldn't get a job because he was 51.

I was born okay.

So it's older.

And they were giving the jobs to the guys that came back from the war, you know, and that was the right thing to do.

My mother had to go on welfare, and they had they had to be divorced, you know, for her to get that she wasn't supposed to work, okay.

But she went and cleaned houses that haunted her.

It was kind of embarrassing when I had to go to the grocery store and use the little red tokens that they gave you in those days, because you were on welfare and my grandmother took the clothes that they sent me, that every other kid who was on welfare had the same clothes.

And my grandmother went to the store and got rickrack something you put on the edge of your clothing to make it look pretty, and you sew it on, and my grandmother put rickrackon my things So I didn't look like the rest of the kids.

Now this all happened after we moved from our area over to Northeast Denver.

I must have moved ten times in my young life because she would say to my mother, it's better, okay, pack up after you go.

It was always in the kind of same neighborhood, but, you know.

So anyway, I had a good relationship with my father, even though had become a drunk, you know, and so forth didn't mean be, it just happened.

And he didn't have the strength to not to do that.

And my mother was just incredible.

I mean, she was the mother of all the kids in the neighborhood, you know, and she was great.

So it was it was rough.

It was rough.

And it was particularly rough in middle school when most of the kids that I knew had a lot more than we had.

Many times we think things that are shameful, for example, or if you're on public assistance or your parents are divorced again, that's all part of Anna Jo's story.

But I also think that is what resonates with people, and it's also what I think was how Anna Jocould connect with people.

Her family's story and what happened with her father, how that influenced her life is really key to how she then becomes an advocate for other families and children.

So if we talk about childcare and the need of working parents or parents or attending school or vocational training, you know childcare is essential.

When you think about how long it took for people to understand that early childhood education wasn't just about, entertainment of the child.

It was really a tool that will help all of us as time goes on.

By helping children in their developmental stages.

In 1974, the year before I left headstart I had a group of parents, say to me, you know, it's great that our kids are getting their but what about us?

We need a head start.

We need to get a job.

We need to have these same kind of privileges.

And I said to the parents, you did really well asking for something.

You used your voice.

Now you're going to have to do the same thing here with this group of people.

So the next meeting came about and we had an interpreter there, and we had, Bea Romer there and I had filled her in on what we were thinking about doing.

And she said, well, if they get a job and we can help do that, they want to get a job, then what are we going to do about childcare?

She said my building would not be big enough to do that because we're doing this across the city.

What would we do?

So they talked about that and said, well, what about asking churches?

It worked.

We got into the churches all across the northeast and the northwest part of the city and business providers who came and did classes for the parents about what they needed to do so they could get a job, Mile High Childcare, then took it in another direction to also include the needs of the parents.

And I left headstart and moved over and began working on making sure that we had enough spaces full-day spaces by the way, because when you work, you need full time care.

Head Start was half days.

We had to really get with it and worked with the business community and the legislators and the council people and everybody that we could possibly get involved in saying we want to be a part of this.

And so Mile High grew and United Way stepped in and helped us, and they gave their settlement houses to Mile High childcare so that we had them for the kids that needed them.

It's in the early part of the century, settlement houses were a part of Mile High, United Way and Mile High.

United way was the first United Way in the world.

The settlement houses were meant to help immigrants, whether it was education or child care.

So even the work of Anna Jo and many others is a continuum.

I did a lot of research on what was known as the Northside Community Center, which became one of Mile High's, first childhood centers.

And so over time, that was the evolution of Mile High Child Care Association, which became Mile High Montessori, which became Mile High child care.

So it's really morphed over the years.

They still use a montessori base and they still contract with headstart.

So kind of that's been a long time that that facility has been in existence.

Back in the day, it was a struggle for parents who wanted to be in the workforce because of the lack of childcare.

Preschool didn't really exist yet.

Preschool.

You really talking about typically a part day, maybe part week, part year program that's a little more intense academically as opposed to childcare, which is typically going to be a full day, full year, which is geared towards working parents.

I was working at Mile High Childcare at that time, who allowed me and encouraged me to be an advocate, wanted me to be at the Capitol and say to people, this is why it's important to do this.

We had to really get with it and work with the business community and the legislators and the council people and everybody that we could possibly get involved.

Mile high grew and United Way stepped in and helped us.

When Roy actually became governor, we were just thrilled because all kinds of things were, you know, going on in with little kids.

As a result of that, Anna Jo was already friends with Governor Romer and Bea Romer, Mrs. Romer, and they hired me.

The office of First Impressions to be the head Start state collaboration director.

First impressions was set up so that people could come to the realization that parents needed childcare because women were going to work.

And this was in the mid 90s.

So I was a part of a small team that was strictly there to move an early childhood agenda, both legislatively with the Colorado preschool program and just making Colorado a better place, really the best place to raise a young child.

Bruce and I and a lot of other people stepped forward and said, okay, we're going to use this to our benefit for the benefit of kids.

And so first impressions became known all over the state of Colorado.

So it was no longer just Denver.

It was Colorado.

And so what we did there, was really what I considered to be a real advocacy.

And we got a bunch of people together and, set up the children's campaign.

We said, we we said we need advocates.

Children need a voice.

They need the care.

They need the education, and they need a voice.

And so first impressions, was in the governor's office, and the couple of us stepped forward and put together a nonprofit, and the children's campaign came as a result of that.

You know, what's so special about Anna, too, is that she connects to the hearts of people, and then she creates a shared vision.

I don't care which, side of the aisle you stand on.

I don't care what your political beliefs are.

We all want what's best for children.

And that is Anna Jo's entry into the door.

And to this day, Head Start is still going.

It's the only, organization out of the war on poverty at that time that is still alive and running.

So it's all over the country and then almost any place you go, you might run into somebody whose children were in headstart or they were in headstart at some point in time.

So the fact that it's still going says that both Republicans and Democrats cared about the children, and it didn't matter whether they were Republicans or Democrats.

And so it was a really wonderful lesson for me to learn.

The woman could work with any Republican, any Democrat across the board, whether it was a city council member, a mayor, a governor, a legislator.

It goes back to that idea of what's good for my family should be good for all families in the sense of not telling a family what to do, but in the sense of opportunity.

It really does go back to this idea of wanting for the betterment for all.

Governor Owens was our governor for eight years.

He was a Republican, and she had a great relationship with Governor Owens.

He would call her for her opinion on certain things.

Similarly with Polis and Hickenlooper and Ritter and Lamm and Romer, all the other Democratic governors, she just she has a way of bringing people in.

She was also instrumental in helping get people elected, including Gloria Tanner.

There's a lot of work that she's done realizing that if you want to make big change, you need to go to the Capitol.

You need to get if you're working to build these programs, they need to be sustainable.

And that's part of it.

And in building your community and seeing, politicians, if you will, as part of that community, that can then help you advocate for what you want.

That's brilliant.

And Anna Jo was really good at that, including the doll project.

We knew we needed to be advocates for the state.

We need to bring the state's attention to this group of youngsters that needed help.

Yeah, that's what the Dole project was all about.

It would have been the early 90s and we were just struggling as a field.

It's like, how do we get the attention of policymakers?

How do we get the attention of legislators and it was either Anna Jo or Barbara, maybe both of them.

It was their idea.

What if we got refrigerator boxes and cut them into the shape of a doll, and we'll distribute those to families and have the families dictate a story from their young child about what their needs were.

So that's where it started.

And I remember the days where we would be at the cover of the children's campaign, including Anna Jo, with our exacto knives, and we're cutting out these patterns of these dolls.

And then we distributed I remember being instructed by Anna Jo as to how to carry those dolls, but I, I use the dolls.

I use the dolls to try to communicate.

These are representatives of these children, and they were in businesses since they were all over the state.

And here were these things.

Dolls had been decorated and sent back to the Capitol and we put them, chairs of the legislators.

On the first day of the session, we started receiving like hundreds and hundreds of dolls.

Some years it was probably thousands.

Then we would have dolls day and on doll day, we would put a doll from a legislators district on his or her chair in the Senate and House.

You can't take all of the children with you to the Capitol, but you can reach people in a non-threatening way by getting them to talk about the children, and that these ideas aren't just kind of floating out there.

These ideas affect real people.

They affect children who in essence, become our future.

So they would come into work and there would be these goofy looking decorated dolls on their chair with a message from Longmont, a message from Boulder, a message here and so we walked the dolls around the Capitol that morning very early.

And then when it got time to we're going to start.

We put the dolls in their chairs, so people took from that.

And so that works.

It worked.

They did it all over.

You could go everywhere.

It worked so well that Senator Kennedy in Washington asked us if we'd bring the dolls to Washington.

And we did.

We got a few other states to participate, and we organized a doll day in D.C. and Anna Jo myself, Barbara, some other advocates from Colorado traveled to Washington with these dolls.

Some other state people came and there were a few legislators, some of our Colorado legislators at the time, and Kennedy did a press conference about the needs of kids, the needs to support child care, the needs to support preschool and childcare providers to improve Head Start.

This ties to Anna Jo looking at civil rights and looking at equality and integration and understanding that if you want to make change, whether it's in early childhood education, improvement for crime statistics or civil rights, you need to do it at the political legislative level.

So I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I've just had a baby.

And this, brochure from Outward Bound comes and says, oh, you know, come with some other women and we'll trek in the Himalayas, etc., etc., etc.. And then my husband came home and I said, guess what, I'm going to the Himalayans.

And he said, I said, yeah, I'm doing this trip and a game of the dates and, you know, is that so?

I said, well, I don't want to do it by myself.

So I called Anna Jo and I said, hey, will you do this with me.

I'm 40, which makes her 65.

And she said, boom.

Yes.

And I think that's it.

She's just gutsy, etc., etc.. We don't didn't know anything.

Never been in that part of the world.

I'd never done anything serious like that in terms of, you know, climbing or hiking.

And I thought she must have and she hadn't either.

And I thought, oh my gosh, this is a woman after my own heart.

She has all this expertise.

She's been on, you know, committees at the white House and, and everyone seemed to look to her as like the premier person to have in the room as an expert, you know, with, with a mile high childcare, etc., etc.

she was just known all throughout.

But also she was the one person my whole life that I knew for sure, for sure, for sure would not be judgmental about me, about my circumstances, about how in many ways to public appearances, how easy my life was in the collection.

There are a number of things that I think speak to Anna Jo's education of herself.

She's reading a lot.

She's writing speeches.

She's very thoughtful and purposeful in what her objective is and what she wants to communicate.

And that is a huge part, I think, of Anna Jo's success in advocacy and working with communities and children and families.

Anna Jo talked one time about how she received an award, and the award was based on philanthropy and what the idea of a philanthropist would be.

And oftentimes that's tied to money.

And Anna Jo chose to write a speech that was really about the philanthropy of what you can give based on your talents and what you contribute to your community.

I have a very interesting relationship with Anna Jo Haynes.

It actually starts with me not understanding her role in advocacy, but directly impacting me.

I was a mom who needed childcare.

My husband made $5 too much for us to qualify for subsidy, but we didn't make enough to pay for childcare.

While we had worked out a situation was mile high United Way that you could, if you were close to being able, you know, to pay it, but just didn't quite make it.

Here was this little puddle of dollars over here for that group of people.

And she was one of them here.

We had a husband and a wife and a wife trying to go to school, and they had kids and they needed that help.

And Lisa got it and went to school.

And, you know, we've been to start to tie this to him since then.

I would not be Doctor Roy without having affordable childcare, and she was responsible for advocating for that and ensuring that that was available to myself and many other families ended up getting her doctorate and has been working and helping kids and families.

And just as you know, a marvelous early childhood, teacher and an advocate for the idea that advocacy begins by knowing yourself, knowing where you come from, knowing what your needs are, coming up with a clear goal, and then really listening to other people and really listening to the needs of other people and asking yourself, well, what are my biases?

Or what is my experience or my commonality?

And then how can we come together for the common good?

Then after you've come up with a goal or you've achieved your goal, you need to sit back and kind of evaluate your goal, and then you come up with a new plan.

So it's very cyclical.

It's not like one and done advocacy starts with neighbors and and the people in your in your personal lives.

And it can extend to like Anna Jo to the halls of the US Congress.

I don't like to use the term we need to empower.

People have power.

We just have to help them to realize the power they have.

Classroom teachers have power here.

We're relying on someone way up here to make decisions for what you've been trained to do.

Do you sit here and continue to do what's not working, or do you use your power to inform, to create change?

And that's what Anna Jo has taught us, and that's part of everything we're putting into this advocacy class.

So I think that's just going to be incredible.

And not only is it important here in Colorado, but there are people are watching it nationally to see what's going to happen with it.

So I just think of all the wonderful people who've been involved, have come to testify, have really paid attention, you know, from all walks of life.

One of the greatest things I learned about advocacy from Anna Jo is substantive change.

that lasts.

So, for instance, you can change licensing rules, but they can be changed.

And what she taught me was the change needed to take place.

And statute.

That's where the the change stays.

And one of the things I learned from that is the difference between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment.

What most people don't know is that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order, but an executive order could be overturned.

What made the difference was the 13th amendment to the Constitution.

It was a constitutional change that freed all slaves.

Of course, there was an exception, you know, and the commission of a crime.

But that constitutional change is what's still last today.

So an advocacy and what we've learned from Anna Jo is that we want more constitutional, long lasting change rather than executive orders or rule regulations or things like that that can be easily overturned when you want to do something and it's for the good of people, then you get good people, and good people do good things.

And I think that Lisa is just going to be great as she goes forward.

But she she was she she did it all, you know, because she put her mind to it.

I see myself fitting into Anna Jos legacy in many different ways.

One is that I am the first executive director and a cabinet position running the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, and that's a dream that Anna Jos pushed for for probably 50 years of her career.

I had worked with every governor.

And, you know, if you want, I can go back all the way back to Governor Lamb.

He was an incredible mentor to me, and he introduced me to all the people in his cabinet and made it possible for me to go and talk with them about early childhood, he said.

We're going to get people to know about this.

They really don't know that education at that level is important.

They think kids are just cute, you know, and that sort of thing.

But, you know, mothers who go into work, fathers are at work.

They need this.

You know, I'm I'm a shorty, you know, I'm not very tall.

And, you know, I have to look up at people.

And so here were these all these and mostly men.

I will tell you, when I first started, there were hardly any women.

Okay?

And the men were all very much taller than they were.

And I have to put up with the padding, my head and all of that.

Such a great idea.

Well, what we can talk about is, again, And Id grit my teeth and say OK, well, I'll be back, you know and I left, got outside, but I went back and I said, you said, come back.

What is it you'd like to know?

But I didn't tell you.

What questions do you have?

You know I didn't give up.

We now have full day kindergarten.

This governor ran on that.

And of course, I was very active in this campaign, making sure that if he's willing to run on this, we're trying to help.

Last fall, we saw Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved by a two thirds majority universal high quality preschool for every kid.

This bill begins the planning of the universal preschool system that starts in 2023 for four year olds, the creation of a new early childhood department that improves the conditions for children from birth until they start school and beyond.

One of the most compelling voices of the moment, there's of course, been, Anna Jo Haynes, who's with us today.

She was also one of the named proponents of the ballot initiative that, established universal preschool.

And we're going to surprise Anna Jo today.

Anna Jo, in your honor, the bill sponsors have agreed to name the bill the Anna Jo Garcia Haynes Early Childhood Act.

Thank you.

So what does that mean for children?

Everything.

Every child in this state has access now to pre-K.

But what does it teach us about policy?

And it teaches us that we have the power to impact change.

It's not overnight.

And like I said, it's all cumulative.

She didn't start how many years ago saying let's do that.

But she built upon it.

She built upon it.

She built upon it.

What?

Anna Jill taught me about policy is that it is a sequence of small wins.

And Jois at the center of everything.

She truly is the through line, through all the events that took place.

You can't tell the story of early childhood education without Anna Jo.

A lot of people come and go.

She stayed there 50 years and she was not only smart, sensitive, caring, but she had the energy and the will to stay with the issue.

Thank you Anna Jo for your for your relentless effort over many decades.

You were ahead of your time advocating for universal preschool and early childhood decades ago.

We're finally catching up as a state, to where you've been for many years.

There is an African thought ubuntu and the spirit of ubuntu is I am because we are because Anna Jo is.

Without a doubt, I would not be where I am if it were not for Anna Jo What she did for me.

I promise I will do for others so that her legacy will continue.

She's done a great job with her own children.

They have excelled and she puts a lot of energy and time into her own grandchildren and guiding them.

You look at Anna Jos life and you see that perfect balance of caring about others, but never sacrificing her own family.

I hope that I say it enough to her how much I love her and more importantly, I hope I say in the things that I do that you are the biggest influence in my life.

Anna Jo, you know, and I know the idea of a multiplier, which is a person who is affecting so many high level political changes, you'll never, ever, ever know how many millions of people that they touch.

That's you.

But I want you to know it's millions and millions and one.

Because when you met me, you didn't know this.

But I was one of those young children inside of myself.

And you taught me.

And you led me, and you accepted me.

And you held me by the hand as you walked the road that I later could walk.

And I am so grateful.

I love you, Anna Jo.

I just feel like it's a dream come true.

I mean, whod of thunk it?

I learned early on, okay.

Oh, be proud of who you are and help people who need help.

It was natural, you know, my mother was like that.

My sister was like that.

I'm like that.

You know what I mean?

That's that's it's kind of what happens, right?

Whatever it is you do, don't let go of the fun.

It is just it's just critical to our lives to have laughter and have fun and be able to learn new things, different things, and to have the ability to be able to do that is just so wonderful.

So I think that's what to do, is learn and have fun.

And.