Making the Good Life Real in Colorado: Q&A with Adrienne Russman

After graduating from college, Adrienne Russman spent six years working for Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, followed by a two-year stint at the state’s Department of Corrections. It was an exciting time in the Colorado policy landscape, during which the state ended solitary confinement for incarcerated people, legalized recreational marijuana, and created a pathway for undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses. 

This work gave Russman a unique perspective on the touchpoints between government and its people: “You can fail or get kicked out of every other social safety net in our country, but you can’t get kicked out of our justice system.”

Today, she is the founder of Reimagine Colorado, an organization that connects policymakers with the people impacted by policy, and does narrative change work talking Coloradans through tough policy issues by starting with shared values.

Russman brings her criminal justice reform experience to her current work imagining what state government can and should provide over the next 50 years. 

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

How It Started

After I graduated from college, I came back to my home state, Colorado, and I was lucky enough to get offered a job in the administration. After a year of opening mail, I landed a job in the policy office. I was in the governor’s office when Colorado legalized marijuana, so I got to play a hand in figuring out what a first-in-the-nation legal framework looks like for bringing an illicit substance into legal use. I also had the opportunity to work in our state Department of Corrections as a member of the executive team. 

Though I’ve left government, I’ve stayed in the social sector working on issues of economic inequality, helping support organizations that have been working on economic inequality. [I’ve been] getting back toward more policy work by collaborating with organizations that support state and local governments around the country to implement programs and policies that are more user-informed, equitable, and outcomes-oriented. 

On the Work

I think about pieces of legislation we championed and then passed, like ending administrative segregation [solitary confinement] in Colorado. That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you. It doesn’t impact a lot of people, but it has profound impacts on the people who do experience it. I also think about when we passed legislation that allowed undocumented immigrants in Colorado to get driver’s licenses and in-state tuition at our public universities.

And those are the kinds of things that really make an impact on people’s lives. It’s not about abstract debates—it’s about whether people can go to work, whether they can get insured, whether they can get an education, whether they can build a life. At the end of the day, it becomes a question of whether people can earn a living and contribute to their community, and whether our policies are actually making people safer and better off.

Reimagine Colorado exists to do three things. First, we address the fact that policy solutions are often developed to deal with something in the short term. Policymakers tend to look at budget deficits and decide what’s going to be best for us in the next year. But if we actually want to address these big, sticky, thorny issues—ones that have been plaguing us for decades—we also need to take a much longer-term approach: not a term of office, but 10, 20, 50 years into the future, so that we can figure out the world we actually want to live in. 

Second, policy change happens issue area by issue area, but that’s not how people live their lives. People live full and complete lives. They think about their kids. They think about school. They think about health. They think about their jobs. And when we make policy, we tend to look at one challenge at a time. The effect of that in statehouses is that we end up fighting our friends over limited resources instead of coming together collectively and putting our resources toward things that would benefit all of us.

Third, policy can be made in a vacuum, and oftentimes what happens on the ground doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. People going through their day-to-day life who need government services could probably tell us exactly what systems aren’t working as well as they could be and what they would do to fix it. So part of what we’re trying to do is bridge that gap between the people who are making policy and the people who are experiencing policy, so that we’re not just creating academically better policy, but policy that is actually effective and meaningful for the people who are living out those decisions.

The Good Life

We have the opportunity to talk with people in the community quite a lot. When we talk about a good life, we hear three values come up really frequently. 

The first is universalism: the idea that there are certain things everybody should have. No one should have to go hungry. Housing shouldn’t be something you have to spend your entire life savings trying to secure. 

The second is security—both physical safety and basic stability like food, healthcare, and housing. People shouldn’t have to fear for their lives, but they also shouldn’t be one emergency away from losing everything. 

Third is self-direction, which I think is really beautiful. It’s autonomy and independence. It’s the idea that you’re not tied to a job you hate because you’re afraid of losing your healthcare.

Once you have those basics covered, it opens up the possibility to pursue what you want in life. To actually have leisure time, creativity, innovation, rest, and the freedom to choose your own path. 

To me, that combination is what a good life looks like: It’s about making sure people aren’t left behind while also giving them space to thrive and pursue what matters to them.

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