Building a Movement: An Integrated Campaign to Elevate Youth Mental Health in Colorado’s Gubernatorial Race 

Colorado’s youth mental health crisis is one of the most urgent public health challenges facing the state. Colorado ranks 31st in the nation for youth mental health, and suicide remains a leading cause of death for young people under 18.  

About 25% of Colorado high school students report feeling consistently sad or hopeless, and tens of thousands of children who need mental health care can’t access it. At the same time, federal funding for children’s mental health programs is fading, leaving critical services increasingly at risk. The crisis doesn’t exist in isolation: it ripples across schools, families, businesses and communities statewide. 

With Colorado’s 2026 gubernatorial election on the horizon, Children’s Hospital Colorado and Healthier Colorado saw a once-in-a-generation mental health advocacy opportunity: statewide polling showed 90% of Colorado voters agree that addressing the child and youth mental health crisis is vital, making this a rare nonpartisan issue with the potential to drive real candidate commitment and lasting policy change.  

But elevating a complex public health issue in the middle of a crowded election cycle and doing so in a way that felt urgent yet hopeful while also nonpartisan yet action-oriented, required a multi-channel communications strategy and a strong, recognizable campaign identity. The two organizations partnered with GroundFloor Media to build the Mind Our Future Colorado brand from the ground up and bring a comprehensive, statewide communications and candidate engagement coalition to life. 

In partnership with Children’s Hospital Colorado and Healthier Colorado, we pursued a two-pronged strategy: large-scale public awareness to elevate youth mental health as a defining issue in the gubernatorial race, and direct candidate engagement to ensure those seeking the state’s highest office were committed to action. Throughout, we centered youth voices and community leaders as the campaign’s most credible messengers.

We began by creating the Mind Our Future Colorado campaign name, brand identity, visual system and website, establishing a hub for the initiative and a consistent, recognizable presence across all channels. The brand was designed to balance honesty with hope: urgent but empowering, accessible and jargon-free, with vibrant color and bold typography signaling that this is challenge we can address together.   

With the brand foundation in place, we executed an integrated, multi-channel communications campaign leading up to the primary election on June 30:

• Earned media was sequenced strategically around four key campaign milestones.  
  • At campaign launch in March 2026, we distributed a press release announcing the formation of Mind Our Future Colorado and the coalition behind it, generating immediate statewide coverage that established the initiative’s credibility and helped attract additional coalition partners from across the healthcare, education and community advocacy sectors. We also promoted a series of statewide roundtables led by Children’s Colorado and Healthier Colorado to gather community input.
  • Leading up to a Gubernatorial Forum on Youth Mental Health, we focused outreach on the release of the Policy Playbook — developed by Children’s Hospital Colorado and Healthier Colorado with a decade of task force recommendations and input from youth, families and community leaders — to ensure candidates arrived at the forum already familiar with the coalition’s top policy priorities.
  • Around the forum itself, we distributed a second press release highlighting candidate commitments and key moments from the event.
  • And post-forum, we sustained momentum through a drumbeat of community leader op-eds placed in publications across Colorado ahead of the primary election. 
• Coalition support was a central pillar of the campaign. With 70+ partner organizations involved, we developed a comprehensive toolkit including fact sheets, newsletter copy, social media content and graphics, and video content, enabling the full coalition to promote the campaign, the Policy Playbook and the broader issue consistently and confidently across their own channels. 
• Video and digital content brought the campaign’s most powerful voices to life. We produced short-form and long-form youth interview videos and community leader videos for use across the website, social media, coalition toolkits and paid media, ensuring that the faces and voices behind the statistics drove the narrative throughout the campaign. 
• Paid media targeted three distinct audiences: Colorado voters statewide via Meta (Facebook and Instagram); lawmakers, candidates and community leaders through placements on Colorado Sun and Colorado Politics; and Colorado youth themselves via TikTok and Instagram, both to engage them in the conversation and to capture what they want for their own futures. 
• The centerpiece of the candidate engagement strategy was the Gubernatorial Forum on Youth Mental Health, held in May 2026 ahead of the primaries. GFM partnered with Children’s Colorado and Healthier Colorado to plan and produce the event, which brought together gubernatorial candidates from both parties, alongside more than 250 attendees including young people, parents, educators, healthcare providers and community leaders. Media partners and a youth representative led questioning on issues ranging from school-based mental health to state budget priorities. The forum was recorded and shared afterwards via press release and social media highlight clips, dramatically extending its reach beyond the room.