Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR)

COLOR’s executive director is a former Obama administration official and a current Democrat political consultant. COLOR has received substantial grants from Warren Buffett’s Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. ¹

Founding and History

Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights was founded in the Denver area in 1998 as the organizational structure for Hispanic groups concerned with the HIV/AIDS outbreak. ² COLOR received tax-exempt status in 2001. ¹

COLOR’s executive director, Dusti Gurule, was a political appointee in the Obama administration, working for the Department of Labor from 2010 through 2017. ³ She also founded the Latina Initiative in 2004 and is a founding partner in Dimension Strategies, a Democratic political consulting firm. ⁴

Funding

COLOR was started with funding from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. ⁵ Since then, it has received funding from Borealis Philanthropy, a pass-through funding entity funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. ⁶

In 2020, COLOR reported receiving $90,000 in funding from the Ms. Foundation for Women; $75,000 from Way to Win; $216,200 from the Groundswell Fund, which also received funding from the Open Society Foundation; and $1.87 million grant from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the charitable foundation of billionaire investment banker and Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett. ¹

Activism

Despite the fact that their name focuses on abortion, COLOR is active in a wide range of policy issues, which it labels as “Reproductive Justice.” Executive director Dusti Gurule explained this apparent discrepancy in an interview in 2018, stating that “economic, sexual, racial, disability, immigration and religious factors keep many people from being able to make genuine choices about their reproductive lives.” ⁷ COLOR engages in lobbying and activism for left-of-center positions on environmentalism, the economy, affirmative action, illegal immigration, and LGBT causes. ⁵

COLOR uses radical-left rhetoric, especially on issues relating to gender and sexuality. It refers to its activists as “COLORistxs” in order to avoid potentially gendered language and describes its target audience as “people who identify as women and people of color.” ⁵ The history section of COLOR’s website is labelled “Herstory.” ⁵

Tactically, COLOR relies on advocacy, community organizing, and voter registration drives to promote its preferred legislation. ⁸