Rachel Friend running for Boulder city council

Rachel Friend on Thursday announced to the Camera her candidacy for one of the six Boulder city council seats up for election Nov. 5.

Friend said she graduated from law school at Notre Dame and now represents asylum seekers who have been detained and imprisoned by federal immigration authorities. She completed undergrad studies in psychology at Stanford, she said.

Her legal career has included: a clerkship with Charles R. Wilson on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals; work as a labor and employment litigation attorney; serving as an in-house attorney and an administrative law judge for Indiana; and general counsel and chief operating officer for a nonprofit providing services to people with disabilities and representing survivors of domestic violence through the Young Women’s Christian Association.

Friend also currently teaches criminal justice courses at Front Range Community College.

She is running in hopes of advancing Boulder’s social justice and flood mitigation efforts, and “governance that emphasizes facts, data, transparency and rejecting fear, especially around transportation, housing and the environment.”

She said her public service in Boulder includes working as a local lead and volunteer, respectively, for the Moms Demand Action and Colorado Ceasefire gun control advocacy groups, co-chairing the South Boulder Creek Action Group neighborhood group advocating for floodwater protection from South Boulder Creek, volunteering with memory care patients at the Frasier Meadows Retirement Community and moderating the University of Colorado’s Conference on World Affairs.

Friend writes fiction novels and enjoys hiking in her spare time.