Who is asking for your fifty dollars.

I'm Jake Browne. I've lived in Denver since 2002, the last stretch of it on the Northside near Regis, where my wife Sam and I just bought our first house.

I grew up poor in Iowa, tagging along while my mom cleaned houses and hung wallpaper. Single mom, food stamps, free school lunch. My first politics was a living-wage campaign in Cedar Rapids as a teenager. A high school teacher got me into it.

Since landing in Denver I've been a journalist and an event producer. I covered Colorado's cannabis rollout as a critic for The Denver Post's Cannabist and wrote for Westword and VICE, mostly going after the worst of that industry. Then I spent a decade running large events in this city: permits, staff, weather calls, angry neighbors, tight budgets. It's work where things either function or visibly fail, with no press release to hide behind.

That's the experience I'm offering, not a resume of boards and endorsements. I have run operations in this city for a decade, I know the permitting counter from the citizen side, and my test for government is the one I used at work: did the thing get fixed?

My day job is marketing director at a Denver event company, and Sam works there too. That company and this campaign do not touch. The full rule set is on the plan page, and the treasurer enforces it.