For Councilwoman Jamie Torres, serving Denver is in her blood. A third-generation Denverite, Torres represents District 3 with a life-long respect and admiration for the community it holds.

Torres was born and raised in west Denver, with her family having lived in the same Villa Park house since her grandparents bought it in the 1960s. She moved to Littleton as a teenager but returned to Denver after earning her undergraduate degree. Today, she lives five blocks from her family home.

Prior to her time on City Council, Torres spent 18 years in Denver’s Human Rights and Community Partnerships Agency and went on to develop the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. While serving as director of the office, Torres was inspired to seek public office.

Nearly two years since she was elected to represent District 3 — comprised of the Barnum, Barnum West, LaAlma/Lincoln Park, MarLee, Sun Valley, Villa Park, West Colfax and Westwood neighborhoods — Torres talked to The Denver Gazette about her time serving her home district.

What made you want to become your district’s city council representative?

The Office of Immigrant Affairs was my first exposure to the different kinds of conversations that happen in local government. I saw that I could propose new ideas for how community engagement happens and how I could advocate for things that are important. After the 2016 election, I realized how much the laws and the legislation that we build in local government affects families’ lives. The ways we engaged to help support immigrant and refugee families really opened my eyes to that and that got me excited for what I could offer my district.

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What I had seen taking place was a gap in information in the office that I worked in, but also just as a resident in west Denver. We’re a long-standing, working-class community and these are folks that are often working multiple jobs. They may not hear about the public meetings that are happening or the board of commissions that is recruiting, so you miss out on a lot of the things the city may be doing. I wanted to help serve them.

I feel so honored to represent this district on City Council because of my ties to these neighborhoods.

How has your experience as a council member been so far?

We’ve now been in this pandemic experience for over a year, which is longer than my time as a City Council person outside of the pandemic. It has challenged us in a number of ways with communication, staying in touch with people, being able to get resources to residents. At the beginning, a group of us local electives in west Denver got together right away, talking every week and doing a town hall every week to share and transmit information. That became a real saving grace and is something we’re continuing to this day.

I’ve had highs recently that have been really incredible, like the work that I and other electives have been doing with equity clinics. We didn’t know how successful they would be, but we started with one and we’ve done two more since then, vaccinating over 3,000 people. Watching people bring their parents through — 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds — there were tears of relief and hope. That was moving to me, that we were actively providing something that was desperately needed. That gave me a lot of inspiration to continue doing these things that are really hard.

Also, in 2019 before the pandemic, we established an anti-displacement working group, bringing folks together to understand who’s doing what work when it comes to keeping residents in their homes, building affordable housing, making opportunities together. Just bringing everyone together and figuring out where are the gaps. That group became even more important during the pandemic.

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Language access has also become a really prominent issue for me, wanting to make sure that we make headway when it comes to language access planning in city departments and how we deliberately accommodate languages in the work that we do. After I was elected, by January we had a working group established to start building the plan and, within a couple months, we had a commitment from the administration that this is something they’d support. I’ve started working with my prior office and they brought on a coordinator to build what a language access policy would look like.

As a council member, what are your priorities for the future?

This year, my biggest priority is making sure that we’ve got COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinics available. It’s been a lot of conversations on why and how we do equity in those spaces. And even as we open up, opening up where it is equitable. I don’t want to see us come back in that inverted L. Being able to influence equitable implementation of what our recovery can look like is a huge priority. If we go back to normal in those vulnerabilities, we would not be effectively serving a district like District 3.

In my 40-something-years in this community, I’ve seen a lot of change. We’ve probably grown by 10,000 to 15,000 people since the last Census. Paying attention to the growing needs of a growing and diversifying district is both exciting and also challenging. I’ve come into it with an element of trying to plan well, while not losing the cultural influence that has made west Denver so remarkable. Our artists, small business owners and creatives have really put our footprint down and I don’t want to lose that. I want to be a part of preserving it.

I want my legacy to be one of effectiveness — that I was effective in advocating for communities that historically weren’t listened to and that we changed that dynamic and actually saw successes. That we will implement a language access plan for the city, that we will make good on our commitment to Indigenous communities. Actively and effectively being able to make that imprint on righting historical wrongs and improving families’ lives is what I hope are mine and my colleagues’ legacies.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.