When Sienna Snook was younger, her mother would sing her to sleep each night. It was a tradition that Sen. Faith Winter kept up even as her life and political career grew busier. And though it would sometimes come through a phone call or a voice recording, “You Are My Sunshine” made it home at night.
As Sienna grew older, Winter would tell her bedtime stories about feminists, “to show me to shoot for the moon,” she told a crowd of mourners on the steps of the state Capitol on Friday.
“Her love stretched far and wide,” Sienna, 14, said. “When I was a kid, she told me she loved me to the moon and back. Now it’s just a little further.”
Winter, a 45-year-old mother to Sienna and Tobin whose decade-long career in public service helped reshape her home state and encouraged countless women to follow in her flipflop-shaped footsteps, was killed in a three-vehicle crash on Interstate 25 near Centennial on Nov. 26, the evening before Thanksgiving. The cause of the crash, which happened in close proximity to another collision, is still under investigation and likely will not be determined for weeks, officials said earlier this week.
Hundreds of loved ones, friends, former colleagues and elected officials crowded seats and, when those filled, the concrete surrounding them for Winter’s memorial Friday. Friends, including women whom Winter had trained and helped run for office, described the lawmaker’s warmth, her love of bright colors and the outdoors, and the optimistic tenacity that helped her endure personal challenges and become one of the most impactful Colorado lawmakers of her generation.
She was a “nerd for women’s leadership,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, who was quoting remarks from another friend. An organizer by profession and passion, Winter was elected to the Westminster City Council before first winning a seat in the state House in 2014. She mentored and trained other women to seek higher office throughout her career, and U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen said Friday that when she met Winter in 2009, she was the first person to tell Pettersen to run for office. She still has Winter’s name saved in her phone as “mentor!”
Her mantra, Rep. Jenny Willford remembered, was “lift as you rise.”
“She didn’t wait for the right moment or the perfect woman,” Willford said Friday. “She saw potential in people before they saw it in themselves, and she insisted that they rise, too.”
In her 11 years at the Capitol, Winter was the primary sponsor on more than 220 bills that passed the legislature. Between the 2022 and 2023 sessions alone, she shepherded more 80 bills into law, a pace that’s likely matched only by the workhorse legislators who draft the state budget. (Her tally could have been even larger: She also was among the legislators whose bills were most frequently vetoed, itself a badge of honor and a marker of her willingness to dig in.)
The layered legacy that emerges from Winter’s time in office will be felt, even if they don’t know it, by millions of Colorado workers, tenants, eating disorder patients, transit riders, lawmakers, legislative aides, lobbyists, affordable housing developers, new mothers, students who use menstrual products, women wondering about a career in politics, and incalculable employees, transgender people and children at risk of harassment.
The shadow cast by the diminutive legislator from Broomfield is long, and there are few classrooms, buses and workplaces that haven’t felt it. In interviews and remarks Friday, several friends called her Wonder Woman.
“As a public servant, she cared so deeply for the Colorado we love, so deeply for Colorado’s most vulnerable,” said Gov. Jared Polis, the first speaker at Friday’s service. “She was kind, and also tough in fighting for her people, her district and our state.”
Her legislative work was remarkably focused. She championed issues because she’d lived them, Hazel Gibson, who was one of the women Winter trained and encouraged to run for office, said in an interview Thursday.
Winter studied environmental science in school, Gibson said. She often relied on her bike to get around. She’d been a worker and a tenant. In college, she’d helped unhoused women.
She championed anti-harassment legislation, including after she and others publicly accused a fellow Democrat of sexual harassment. The lawmaker, Steve Lebsock, was later expelled from the legislature. The allegations prompted broader investigations within the Capitol, and Winter later sponsored legislation to improve how harassment complaints are filed and investigated.
Winter became a fan of Kesha, the pop star who’d accused her producer of abuse, and she kept a cape in her office, “for anyone who wants to feel powerful,” she said in 2023. (She also loved Taylor Swift.)
Winter’s work was all the more remarkable given the battery of personal challenges she faced.
She became a face of Colorado’s political #MeToo movement after coming forward with allegations against Lebsock. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2022. The next year, she was hospitalized after crashing her bike to avoid a truck while riding to the Capitol.
In 2024, she was investigated by her colleagues and was found to have violated ethics rules after she appeared intoxicated at a community event. She entered treatment for substance use and returned to the Capitol, where she soon helped pass one of the most sweeping housing reform bills in the state’s history.
“She wasn’t (perfect), but no one is, and she knew she wasn’t,” Sienna said of her mother. “That’s why, when I was little, she taught me an important lesson. I got into my first argument with my parents, and she sat me down and taught me how to apologize. She told me that apologies weren’t about me. They weren’t something that I should use to make me feel better. They were about the other person. You have to own up to your actions. Don’t make excuses. Show that you care, then you have to act. My mother was an action- and changemaker.”
Often, that change-making took years, a persistence that defined Winter’s career.
After repeated attempts to require businesses to provide paid family leave benefits failed in the Capitol, Winter took the issue to the ballot box, where voters passed it by more than 15 points in 2020. In its first 18 months, paid family leave has already been used by nearly 200,000 Coloradans who’ve received more than $1 billion in benefits, Pettersen said Friday.
“I know that was a little wonky,” she said. “But so is Faith Winter.”
Extending Title IX protections for women and girls to high school students took multiple swings. So, too, did legislation limiting harassment in the workplace. When that bill was finally passed, Winter donned the silver cape for the bill signing.
“That was her,” Gibson, who also spoke Friday, said. “She taught me: This is your goal. How are you going to get there? And to look at all the different ways you can get there. That’s how I look at everything now, whether it’s lobbying or planning her (funeral) service.
“She was never a person that backed down or (thought) the fights were too big. She might need to pause, take a breath. But she always came back.”
Her children were her joy, friends said. She “brought them along inside her world,” Pettersen said in an interview Thursday, and Winter declined calls to run for higher office because of the demands it would put on her time.
“She said, ‘These are the most important years for me to be there for my kids,’ ” Pettersen said.
A fifth-generation Coloradan, Winter was a hiker, a kayaker, a camper. Pettersen remembered Winter, Sienna and Tobin all sleeping in hammocks slung between tall trees. The family hiked together every Sunday, with Winter in flipflops. Her health later slowed her down, making the hikes more difficult and the kayaking trips less frequent.
But even still, “she never stopped seeking beauty,” Gibson said Friday. “She never stopped choosing color or flowers or dresses or joy. She never stopped finding reasons to laugh, especially at herself, especially when life was absurd. She lived big, yes, but more than that, she lived bright. And she made the people she loved brighter, too.”
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