Social Change and Policy Conference

This track centers on the formal levers of change; how organizers, advocates, and affected communities engage legislatures, regulatory bodies, and government agencies. Sessions explore both the possibilities and limits of policy pathways, especially for BIPOC communities often excluded from these processes.

Example topics:

• How to read and respond to an environmental impact statement
• Building a statewide water equity coalition
• Showing up and speaking out: navigating public comment forums
• Testifying while Black: navigating white institutional spaces
• Keeping the momentum going during long legislative sessions
• Youth-led legal actions (e.g., Our Children’s Trust)

This track honors the irreplaceable power of direct action, community organizing, and grassroots mobilization. From blockades to boycotts to base-building, sessions explore how people build collective power outside institutional channels, and why that pressure is often what makes institutional change possible.

Example topics:

• Land back: Indigenous-led strategies for land reclamation
• Organizing against ICE detention in your city or county
• Sustaining momentum after a campaign loss or during a long legislative fight
• Youth climate strikes and intergenerational organizing

This track sits at the intersection of environmental justice, immigration, and social work practice. It asks practitioners to grapple with climate migration not just as a policy issue but as a lived reality showing up in their caseloads, their communities, and their clients’ stories right now, and increasingly so in Colorado, where drought, wildfire, and agricultural collapse are reshaping who lives here and why.

Example topics:

• Climate refugees and U.S. immigration law: what social workers need to know now
• Drought, displacement, and the Colorado River: climate migration in our own backyard
• Trauma-informed practice with climate-displaced BIPOC communities
• ICE detention and climate migrants: the criminalization of displacement
• Preparing the social work profession for the climate migration crisis ahead

Environmental racism is a form of ongoing trauma. This track centers healing justice: the understanding that liberation work requires tending to the whole person and community. Sessions explore trauma-informed practices, rest as resistance, and building organizations that can sustain change over generations.

Example topics:

• Somatic practices for climate grief and activist burnout
• Building a culture of care and accountability in your movement
• Healing from environmental harm: community storytelling circles
• How frontline BIPOC women are redefining movement sustainability
• Using joy as a form of resistance

Example topics:
• Somatic practices for climate grief and activist burnout
• Building a culture of care and accountability in your movement
• Healing from environmental harm: community storytelling circles
• How frontline BIPOC women are redefining movement sustainability
• Using joy as a form of resistance

This track explores the overlapping and interlocking nature of oppression, and the movement-building strategies that emerge when we refuse to silo our struggles. The same systems that poison water in Indigenous and economically excluded communities are connected to the forces that criminalize Black bodies, exploit undocumented labor, displace disabled people, and deny reproductive autonomy.

We invite proposals that center BIPOC-led organizing across issue areas, examine how coalitions are built and sustained across difference, and challenge practitioners to examine how their own organizations may inadvertently reproduce the fragmenting logic of the systems they’re fighting.

Example topics:

• Environmental and reproductive justice: the same bodies, the same fight
• Immigration enforcement and environmental vulnerability in BIPOC communities
• Disability justice and toxic exposure: the erasure of disabled BIPOC voices
• Housing, land, and environmental racism: organizing across movements in Colorado
• When coalitions fail: honest lessons from cross-movement collaboration

We strongly encourage proposals that:

• Center BIPOC communities, perspectives, and leadership — especially those directly affected by environmental injustice
• Include an interactive element that actively engages participants rather than presenting to them

Proposals meeting one or both criteria will receive priority consideration in the review process.