Abigail Colón exists. At least she does now. She thought she did before, but she could never prove it—which, it turns out, is a real problem.
She was born at home in Woodland Park, Colorado. Her birth was not immediately registered, and she spent her life being denied rights that most of us take for granted. She couldn’t legally vote, work, drive, marry her partner, get health insurance, buy a gun, or travel internationally.
After years of bureaucratic dead ends, Abigail turned to Colorado Legal Services. Their attorneys gathered hundreds of pages of records and sued the State of Colorado, arguing that Colorado’s delayed birth certificate rules, some of the strictest in the country, are unconstitutional.
The fight paid off, and the State proposed changing its rules so that Abigail and all people like her, whose parents possibly didn’t properly document their birth at the time, can get their birth certificates with some due process.
And if the Colorado Board of Health adopts the new rules as proposed in February, Abigail will be able to get the document affirming what she has always known but will now be able to prove—that she exists. And then she will no longer be denied the rights that so many of us take for granted.
How did she get the help she needed? Through Colorado Legal Services, which opens more than 11,000 cases a year—40% related to protecting housing, 23% related to family law, 13% related to protecting consumer rights, and the rest covering the myriad of legal needs people have.
Over 1 in 5 Coloradans qualify for CLS services based on income. And all of this is accomplished with only 89 in-house attorneys.
This must cost taxpayers a fortune, right? Wrong. More than 80% of this program is funded by Colorado banks through their participation in COLTAF—the Colorado Lawyer Trust Foundation. These banks hold attorney trust accounts and donate the premium interest earned on those accounts to the Foundation. That interest, not taxpayer dollars, funds legal services for Colorado’s most vulnerable residents—people who otherwise would not have access to the legal help they need.
The only local bank in town, founded right here in 1965, Bank of Estes Park, has participated in this program for over 30 years, and has actually been recognized by the Supreme Court of Colorado on an annual basis for the bank’s strong support of this vital program, overseen by one of the bank’s senior executives at the bank and holding company level, Jenny Miles.
When you are making your choice of where to bank, please consider the impact that a truly local bank makes in our community—your deposits, your loans, the bank’s charitable donations, and even the bank’s profits stay right here. And more, because sometimes, people without a lot of resources might need to prove something as basic as the fact that they exist, or that they have some other legal need.
And because of Bank of Estes Park and the other banks that participate in the COLTAF program, they have somewhere to turn to for help. Where you bank matters a whole lot to people like Abigail Colón.