Colorado
Bright Leaf helps grandparents raising grandkids in Colorado as they face holiday hardships
At a kitchen table in Arvada, backpacks and homework papers take over. It’s a common sight for Carla Aguilar, but one she never expected to repeat.
“I thought I was all done raising kids, you know?” Aguilar said.
For more than a decade, Aguilar has been raising her two granddaughters, Ava and Athena. Ava, 12, was too shy to appear on camera, but 8-year-old Athena proudly showed how her grandmother helps her learn.
“She helps me read,” Athena said. “She taught me how to write correctly.”
Aguilar, 55, is disabled and lives on a fixed income. She says every day is a balancing act, and this time of year is challenging.
“Holidays are hard, so we’re kind of dealing with that right now,” she said.
Aguilar’s story is far from unique. According to the latest data from the American Society on Aging and the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 2 million grandparents nationwide are primary caregivers for their grandchildren. In Colorado, more than 36,000 families face the same reality, often with limited financial resources and little support.
“Most of these seniors are on fixed income, social security, disability, and you can’t really stretch that too far in Colorado these days,” said Steve Olguin, executive director of Bright Leaf, a nonprofit that helps older adults across the state.
Bright Leaf started as a small community group and now provides free home repairs, food assistance, and other essentials to seniors statewide. Its newest initiative, GrandCare Alliance, focuses on grandparents raising grandkids — offering help with school costs, activity fees, and holiday wish lists.
“We’re just trying to help out so it’s not as rough for them,” Olguin said.
For Aguilar, that support is a lifeline. She says her granddaughters are her world, and she’ll never stop fighting for them.
“They’re my heart, my soul, everything,” Aguilar said. “I will take care of them until my last breath.”
Bright Leaf is asking for the community’s help in supporting the GrandCare Alliance and its other services. Those who want more information on how to volunteer and donate can visit their website.
Colorado
Colorado elections clerk set to be released from prison Monday based on her sentence commutation
DENVER, Colo. (AP) — Former Colorado elections clerk and conspiracy theorist Tina Peters is scheduled to be released from prison Monday after serving less than a quarter of a nine-year sentence for her role in a scheme to copy her county’s election system.
Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted Peters’ sentence last month following pressure from President Donald Trump.
The Colorado Department of Corrections would not confirm the time of Peters’ release, and a representative for her attorney said Peters would not speak to the media when she is freed.
Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election. She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 — and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.
Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.
Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April, but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.
Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because the 70-year-old was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead, the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him to a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command to Alabama.
Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on May 15. In a letter, he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time non-violent offender.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to ”selling out our state’s justice system for Trump.”
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