A Letter from Kate Horle: Reflecting on My First Year as CEO at CWEE

Dear CWEE community,

I arrived at CWEE on July 26, 2023 full of equal parts excitement and trepidation. I was nervous about the work that needed to be done and so excited to be part of an organization that was fully ingrained in the Metro Denver community. I thought I understood how much there was to learn. I had no idea how little I really knew and understood about working with families for whom today’s workforce structure was not built.

What a year it has been!

There is a magic to working with families who have survived in a system designed to be inequitable and oppressive to them. Once they know what they want and they feel safe chasing those dreams, there is a resilience and grit in them unlike anyone else. Seeing that grit in action and watching the gentle guidance given by the CWEE staff has been an unexpected gift. There are also lessons to be learned from those who struggle, and leave CWEE before returning and leaving us again. Compliance and need bring people to us, but it is the CWEE method that keeps them coming back. This team understands how stability, accountability and goal setting create confidence, and confidence helps participants find their way to security- whatever that means for them. All this structure matters, but the intangible power of relationship really drives our success. The staff is deliberate about building relationships through motivating, asking questions, listening, and learning alongside our participants. They become partners in the journey these families are on and that makes all the difference.

The community that surrounds CWEE has also brought joyous surprises. There are so many organizations and individuals who want to support and celebrate our participants—I continue to be amazed that, in this time of cultural divisiveness, there is still so much beneficence and nurturing for those who live in the margins. CWEE has reached out and asked the community to help us understand how we can better provide childcare for working families and so many have stepped up to participate in that research. It has been wonderful to watch.

Speaking of communities and culture, this first year has also brought the opportunity to create an organizational cultural shift. Writing those words is easy, however, and changing culture is harder than almost anything. Someone once said to me that “Culture eats strategy for lunch, every day” and truer words have never been spoken. A leader can have the clearest, most thought out strategy in the world, but without a collaborative, innovative, engaged culture of lifelong learning—that strategy is just snacks.

The culture work the CWEE team undertook has been foundational. We are learning what it means to lead from a place of equity and inclusion—to create true belonging in the workplace for the humans that work here. That work encumbers us with the responsibility to be transparent and honest about the biases we carry and to transform our work practice to facilitate the diminishment of the disparities that privilege conveys. This work is hard and brings both stress and relief as we navigate the rough territory of exposing our very human flaws to each other and accepting them.

Despite the challenges of this approach, I have been incredibly impressed with the commitment to doing the hard work of changing routines and minds to think differently and act with intent in our daily work. It has been truly transformative for me to watch, and I know that a year from now, we will be a better, more inclusive, more equitable, more transparent, and more accountable organization.

Predicting the future is not for the faint of heart. In fact, unless you have some incredible skills mostly found in fantasy books or films, it’s not really for anybody. So, I am taking a real risk here when I say this: CWEE has another 42 years left in it. I hope that I get to be part of making each of the coming years better than the one before for our participants, our staff and our board.

– Kate Horle