Who is Rose Community Foundation (RCF) giving their money to? About those bag fees. Polis has now signed the law repealing an earlier Ag union bill

Who is Rose Community Foundation (RCF) giving their money to?

This is a follow up to my earlier intro post about RCF (see the first link below if you'd like the context).

In that intro post I mentioned that Rose Community Foundation, a big cog in the state's NGO/nonprofit machine gives away a lot of money. The two summaries I offered last Friday were:

--Since 2020, RCF, per the Colorado Secretary of State's TRACER contribution tracker, has doled out $626K in political contributions to causes ranging from abortion rights to "free" school lunches, to gay rights, to taxes.

--From their most recent 990 form (the tax form 501(c)(3)'s are required to file) RCF gave out grants and donations to 469 other 501(c)(3)'s and government organizations in 2023. Grants ranging in amount from thousands up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Let's look into those in a little more detail.

I took screenshots from the Secretary of State's TRACER political contributions page and attached them as screenshots 1 and 2.

This gives all of the DIRECT (there is also plenty of indirect, or pass-through, contributing going on) contributions RCF has made in Colorado since 2020. As their self-description has it, RCF is indeed engaged in values-driven philanthropy. Perhaps they are not values I share, but they clearly have their causes.

Turning now to RCF's 990, let's look who they are granting their money to that doesn't fall under the label of explicitly political contributions.** I link to the most recent 990 second below, via ProPublica's page. If you want to see other, older 990 forms, you'll find more at RCF's own financials site (linked third).

Tax forms are long, boring, and dense. There is a lot of financial information in this report, but skip down to the "Schedule I: Grants and Other Assistance to Organizations, Governments and Individuals in the United States" attachment. This is where you will find who RCF is giving their money to.

I won't go row by row, but there were a few rows that stood out to me (if you poke around in the table and see something interesting, pipe up in the comments and let us know). Screenshots 3a and 3b show those rows.

I chose this group because of a few patterns. First, note uber-progressive Rep Lorena Garcia's nonprofit Statewide Parent Coalition in there. She gets lots of state money. Apparently gets lots from RCF too. Good for them. Good for her.

In terms of other broad patterns, I want you to note just how many media organizations (across both screenshots), including public media, get money from RCF. All the more interesting when you note that one of the purposes of the giving (for public media) is often funding DEI reporting. If you study media and the press, you'll often note that nonprofit and public media swear up and down that funders don't make editorial decisions.

That may be true in the sense that there is no one from RCF in the newsroom telling them what to write, but thinking this is the only influence there could be is naive. Relationships matter. Incentive structures around pleasing funders matter.

Someone buying training and funding reporting of a certain kind (to keep the steady drumbeat going) matters.

Someone giving to influence the media ecosystem in this state matters.

Earlier in this post I mentioned direct, or explicit, political activity. It might have occurred to you to wonder what implicit or indirect political activity might look like. You see what I would term implicit activity in these screenshots. Look in particular at the lines for "Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom", "New Era Colorado", "One Colorado" (note two entries here), and "Warm Cookies of the Revolution". These are not political party apparatuses, but when you go visit their sites, it is clear that the intent of each is to influence politics in Colorado.

They are there to influence politics in a progressive, liberal direction. RCF is giving to them to influence politics without directly doing so.

One last one that caught my eye near the bottom. Note the Trailhead Institute. If you've read my writing long enough, that name should be familiar. Trailhead Institute partners often with CDPHE's Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Firearm Injury Prevention Institute (those who run much of the infrastructure over at CDPHE"s Office). That is, they are big, big into public health and guns.

In future posts, we'll look at the state money going to RCF. What are they getting money for? What work are they doing for the state?

Stay tuned.

**As a 501(c)(3) remember that their "major purpose" cannot be political. $626K is a lot of money, but if you took the time to total their other grant-making and contributions that aren't directly political you'd see that they do not fail that test.

https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/who-is-rose-community-foundation?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/840920862/202422819349301242/full

https://rcfdenver.org/our-story/financials-governance/

Related:

Writing the post above sparked another connection I put here to call especial attention to.

CPR and the Colorado Sun, within a short amount of time, both wrote "news" articles promoting civic engagement highlighting the work of the group Warm Cookies of the Revolution. I wrote an op ed at the time calling this out which I link to at bottom.

Guess who funds CPR AND Warm Cookies?

Rose Community Foundation.

I am not alleging that there is a fix in here. It is possible that RCF had a hand in this coverage, but I don't automatically assume it.

As opposed to a conspiracy, I favor the idea that this coincidence is more a measure of just how well entrenched and connected Colorado's liberal NGO/nonprofit/government ecosystem is.

https://completecolorado.com/2024/11/18/gaines-colorado-newsrooms-left-wing-civic-engagement/

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About those bag fees

I had a reader ask me (long ago before the legislative session and the end of the Spring semester moved many a thing to the back burner) about bag fees: how much is getting collected and where is it going.

So, in starting to look into this, I was initially mistaken. I thought (or forgot) that the bag fee is entirely a local thing. See, for example, screenshot 1 taken from the State Department of Revenue's website.

That being the case, I turned local. I contacted my (now-former) county commissioner Jerry Sonnenberg and asked about county bag fees. He did a little looking and told me that currently there is probably only one or two stores in the county where it might apply (out East from me) and that the county doesn't bother asking or collecting.

I turned next to the other government I'm a part of. The city of Sterling. I put in a CORA request (after calling first) to get their bag revenues and where they're going. The response is linked below.

The results aren't broken down by store, but you have the results since the city first had to start collecting them.

There is an interesting note to add here. For each of the numbers you see on the list of remittances to the city, you have to remember that this is 60% of the money the store took in. The stores are allowed, under state law, to retain 40% of the other bag fee money collected.

So, using one of the larger remittances as an example. When the city collected $10,841.94 on 10/28/2024, that means the stores that submitted could have been keeping up to $7227.96 for themselves.

That's the amount coming in. The explanation of where it's going is really short. Quoting the email I got from the Sterling City Attorney (who sent the response to my CORA request), "The City has not spent any portion of the bag tax proceeds."

I had to smile at that because I will bet you my lunch that the City of Sterling takes the same tack as other local governments when it comes to bag fees (something I wrote about back in 2023 and which I link to second below).

I didn't ask for this money ...

I don't know what to do with this money ...

And yet by law, it's gotta be collected and we can't use plastic no more. Well, we can't use them at the grocery. Still lots of plastic everywhere that I can see. More thoughtful and useful policy in this state.

p.s. if you want to know about your own municipality, send them a CORA request. If you want some help in learning how, message me and I'll help you find resources. If you find something of note, give me a heads up.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qHLbsvTV6IkrDNU3aEruk3bkNUafUTaU/view?usp=sharing

https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/what-can-you-do-about-rising-property?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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Update: Polis has now signed the law repealing an earlier Ag union bill

Back in mid March (see the first link below if you need or want the context) I wrote about a 2025 bill that would rewrite a 2021 law about agricultural union organizing.

That bill made it through the legislature and, as of 5/29 is now state law with Governor Polis' signature. If you want a brush up and to learn about the bill signing, check out the second link below.

I'm glad. As was the case with Polis' veto on the CORA bill this session, he made the right call.



https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/correcting-an-earlier-state-law-on?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false


https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/colorado-law-repealed-farmers-rights/article_cbcdfbc6-7be9-444f-b616-357835986503.html#google_vignette