Chavez puts heart and soul into all she does
Anyone who equates a big heart and kind soul with being a pushover hasn’t met Judy Chavez. The 2006 Outstanding Staff Award winner for academic units, Chavez has never been one to keep quiet when the rights of others are on the line.
“Judy is an engaging person with a huge heart. She has a way of getting people to speak up and voice their opinions,” her nomination letter states. “She is also an advocate. She will go to bat for anyone that she feels is being treated unjustly or just hasn’t been given a chance.”
It’s not as if Chavez, director of budgeting and resource services in the Business School since 1997, just recently found her voice. As the oldest of five children, she’s been looking out for the little guys since the time she learned to walk and talk.
It was in the 1960s, however, that she took her mission public. After trying her hand as a sociology/psychology major at Pitt, Chavez signed up for President Kennedy’s VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a domestic service program to provide urgently needed services in urban and rural areas of poverty in America.
“I came here in 1969 from Pittsburgh,” she recalls. “The sun was so bright, the air was so clear. . . I asked the cab driver where the biggest city was and he said, ‘This is it, lady.’”
It was through the VISTA program Chavez got her first taste the University of Colorado—the Boulder campus had obtained the federal grant for training in Monte Vista. Chavez worked for the Colorado Migrant Council for a year, fighting for the rights of underserved populations in southwest Colorado. “In those days, they were asking to bring immigrants over–Mexican migrant workers.”
The laborers Chavez was sent to assist were hired to pick potatoes in the San Luis Valley, but when the weather didn’t cooperate and they couldn’t work the fields, leaving them without food, heat or money to buy groceries. At one point, Chavez and her VISTA colleagues secured a bus and tried to help the workers get back to Shiprock, N.M., and found themselves instead confronted by angry farmers with rifles.
“They wanted to kick us out,” she says with a chuckle. “They considered us communist agitators.”
Chavez went on to assist Cesar Chavez’s labor movement in the San Luis and Arkansas valleys, ran a federal program for lactating women and their babies, and worked for Head Start. Chavez also worked for a program promoting education among migrant communities. “A couple of them did take part and graduated from CU,” she says.
Her first experience with the University of Colorado’s downtown Denver campus (at that time CU-Denver) was as a student, graduating in 1984 with a business degree in mineral lands management. “I was the oldest student hourly worker, the oldest student representative, and I was the oldest one on the discipline committee,” she recalls.
Chavez hasn’t slowed any since those days. She manages to work volunteering into her work and home life. On the work front, she serves on the Internal Communications Committee of the Academic Master Plan, has been a CU Peers (now EPA?) representative to the Budget Priorities Council for the last two years and belongs to Phi Chi Theta business fraternity. Chavez also held all collegiate officer positions and all alumni officer positions. Outside of the university, Chavez has been involved in political campaigns and volunteering at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (for more than a decade), the Denver Art Museum and with Chicano Arts and Humanities. She most recently volunteered at the Indigenous Games held in part on the Auraria Campus. “It’s interesting; you meet all kinds of different people,” she says. “That’s how you learn about your community.”
Her strong work ethic and vocal activism have helped build Chavez’s reputation on the downtown Denver campus as a top performer, a team player, a fierce ally and Staff Council’s best of the best in the academic units in 2006. “I have a heightened sense of fairness,” she says. “If I don’t think it’s fair, I just have to say something.”