Katie Colton

Katie Colton is Director of the Colorado Housing Consortium at BuildStrong Foundation, where she leads cross-sector work to make affordable and attainable housing easier to develop across Colorado. She is a public policy and community development advocate focused on affordable housing, government-benefits user experience, and data-driven collaboration; she previously worked as an engagement manager in McKinsey & Company’s public sector practice.

Rural Opportunity Requires Childcare, Jobs, and Benefits Built Together

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Cynthia McFadden led a discussion with Derek Kilmer of the Rockefeller Foundation, Save the Children’s Janti Soeripto and South Carolina community leader Pamela McKnight on why rural opportunity policy fails when jobs, childcare, food, housing, broadband and benefits are treated separately. The speakers argued that rural families experience those systems together, and that economic mobility depends on investing in both work and family infrastructure through locally designed partnerships. Their case was that rural America is not a single problem to be solved from Washington, but an underinvested set of communities where access, administrative complexity and inflexible funding often determine whether children and parents can use opportunities that formally exist.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202617 min read