Colorado Is Showing the Country What’s Possible for Youth Mental Health

Ascend Fellow Dr. Ron-Li Liaw is building a movement — and a model — that puts families first

When Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a pediatric mental health state of emergency in 2021, it was one of the first hospitals in the country to use that language publicly. It was a signal that the crisis was real, that it demanded a systemic response, and that someone needed to lead it. That someone became Dr. Ron-Li Liaw.

As the inaugural Mental Health In-Chief at Children’s Hospital Colorado, Dr. Liaw was tasked with shaping and overseeing child mental health vision, strategy, operations, quality, safety, and workforce development system-wide. As an Ascend Fellow, she has carried that same urgency into the national conversation — consistently arguing that fixing youth mental health requires a full societal effort, not just a clinical one.

Now, she’s helping turn that conviction into a statewide call to action and making Colorado a model for integrated health services.

A Coalition With a Mission

In early 2026, Children’s Colorado and Healthier Colorado launched Mind Our Future Colorado, a new statewide initiative calling on Colorado’s gubernatorial candidates to commit to bold and comprehensive solutions to address the youth mental health crisis. To date, more than 60 healthcare, early childhood, business, and consumer groups have joined this rallying cry.

The initiative is explicit about its ambitions beyond Colorado’s borders. As the hospital’s President and CEO put it, “Colorado has the opportunity to be a leader in confronting the ongoing national youth mental health crisis — to declare that today’s children and youth are a priority and to be a model for other states in addressing challenges within the behavioral health system.”

Dr. Liaw’s framing of the effort goes straight to families. As she has said, sustained progress requires the partnership of many organizations and state leaders advocating on behalf of children and youth, who don’t have the ability to vote for themselves — and this coalition is designed to bring together the voices of families and young people to shape the mental health supports, systems, programs, and policies youth desperately need. These diverse voices are represented in the policy playbook recently released by Children’s Hospital Colorado and Healthier Colorado. 

What Colorado Has Already Built

Mind Our Future Colorado wasn’t launched from scratch. It builds on work Dr. Liaw has driven at Children’s Hospital Colorado over the past five years — work that gives the initiative real credibility.

Inside the hospital, her team overhauled the inpatient psychiatric unit using evidence-based, trauma-informed care. The results include a 90% drop in the use of restraints and seclusion and an 80% reduction in team member injuries — a transformation that demonstrates what a family-centered, humane model of crisis care can look like. To help families navigate what comes next, Children’s Hospital Colorado launched a Pediatric Mental Health Care Transitions Team — a multidisciplinary group of placement specialists, health navigators, educational specialists, care coordinators, and peer and family support partners — to provide wraparound support as families move from hospital to community.

Beyond the hospital, Dr. Liaw has championed solutions that meet families where they are. In Durango, a rural community in southwestern Colorado, a school-based mental health team provides comprehensive evaluations and treatment recommendations for referred students. Colorado is among a small number of states developing an AmeriCorps model for youth mental health workers, providing mostly college graduates with training and loan forgiveness to fill workforce gaps in underserved communities.

Suicide prevention is another through line of this work. Suicide is a leading cause of death for children beginning at age 10 in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountain region — yet most families and communities don’t recognize it as the urgent, preventable crisis it is. Children’s Hospital Colorado is building out a statewide prevention infrastructure: universal screening in emergency departments, family-based interventions that engage parents and children together, and deep partnerships with schools and providers across the state, including in rural, frontier, and tribal communities. The effort is data-driven and producing results — the hospital tracks mental health risk and protective factors for youth across Colorado and has documented a 26% decrease in youth suicide rates over four years, even as budget cuts have threatened many of these systems statewide.

When prevention isn’t enough, the speed and quality of crisis response matters enormously. With a large percentage of Colorado’s mental health clinicians operating outside insurance networks and waitlists stretching for months, too many families wait until a breaking point — and then call 911. Children’s Hospital Colorado has redesigned that path: emergency spaces designed for youth in crisis offer family-centered alternatives to traditional settings, including 72-hour stabilization environments where caregivers receive intensive education about their child’s diagnosis, treatment options, and community resources. Families with lived experience shape this work through a Mental Health Family Advisory Council and a youth council focused on suicide prevention — because the most effective solutions are built with the people most affected.

Perhaps the deepest investment is in catching mental health needs before they reach a crisis point. In February 2026, Children’s Hospital Colorado launched the Collaborative Care Model in pediatric primary care — a team-based approach that embeds mental health professionals directly into pediatricians’ offices, where more than half of children seen have a mental health component to their care. Patients who screen positive for depression, anxiety, or other risk factors get support during the same visit — without a referral, waitlist, or separate system to navigate. The initial cohort covers five practices. Over the next several years, Children’s Hospital Colorado plans to expand integration to more than 30 pediatric practices, reaching approximately 600,000 children statewide. By integrating mental health into the well-child visit — the touchpoint a majority of families use for physical health — Colorado is building the prevention infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

A Model Solution

As states look for opportunities to advance family well-being, Children’s Hospital Colorado offers models built for scale. Deliberately connecting clinical innovation, community-based solutions, and political will, the initiative ensures that what’s been built at the hospital becomes the foundation for lasting state policy.

Last year alone, Children’s Hospital Colorado cared for more than 14,400 pediatric patients who received mental health treatment within its integrated system of care — a 6% increase over 2024. The demand is not going away. But neither is Dr. Liaw’s determination to meet it — for families in Colorado, and as a model for families throughout the country.