Julissa Molina Soto

Julissa is considered one of the current leaders in public health in the state of Colorado and has served in significant leadership capacities in numerous capacities across the state. Julissa’s background includes over 10 years of success in leading and managing community based outreach programs targeting Latinos. Her success in developing and managing programs that promotes peace, social justice, and immigrants’ rights, outreach to minority communities and enhancing the capacity of community-based organizations in providing health services to underserved minority communities is unparalled in the State of Colorado . She is fluent in both Spanish (her first language) and English. She also offers particular expertise in outreach to the various Hispanic communities, with in-depth knowledge of outreach to new immigrants. Through partnerships and cooperative arrangements with clinics, Julissa has demonstrated an exceptional capacity to mobilize public and private organizations and community representatives to address diabetes in Hispanic communities. Under her dynamic leadership, over 25,000 Latinos received culturally competent, linguistically appropriate health promotion and disease prevention services in 2006. Furthermore, as Program Director of Por Tu Familia for ADA-Colorado Area, Julissa has been responsible for increasing the budget of the program by over 1000% in the last year.

She believes that community organizing is critical to creating social change. It provides people with experiences that lead to dramatic individual transformation in terms of new skills, more fully-explored personal values, and a sense of personal power. Through Por Tu Familia, she has been able to build a sense of community in underserved communities across the State of Colorado, constructing civil society in a region of the country undergoing dramatic change, and it has also allowed her to build relationships with groups across the barriers of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Through Por Tu Familia, she also has been able to create an informed and active and empowered immigrant community that attempts to get progressive leaders into power and hold them accountable to the community. Her goal is to build the power to demand and get the most progressive public policy reforms adopted, enforced and protected. In a state hard-hit by the localized effects of immigration reform, the ability of communities to resist at that local level may well determine whether Coloradoans lead the way to a more representative and humane democracy or are fodder in the economic race to the bottom.