Highlights from an evening of excellence that recognized the stars of the night and their glowing achievements.
The 2024 President’s Reception marked the 18th year of this annual celebration and fundraiser for Water Education Colorado. More than 220 friends, colleagues and supporters joined us on Sept. 5 to celebrate the mission and impact of WEco, along with the achievements and contributions of our award recipients. We were delighted to honor Doug Kemper with the 2024 Diane Hoppe Leadership Award and Lorelei Cloud with the 2024 Greg Hobbs Next Wave Leadership Award (formerly the Emerging Leader Award).
This year, WEco renamed the Greg Hobbs award to honor the legacy of this former Colorado Supreme Court Justice and long-time Vice President and Publications Chair of Water Education Colorado. We also bid farewell to WEco’s former executive director, Jayla Poppleton, and welcomed our new executive director, Juan Pérez Sáez.
With sincere thanks to our dedicated community’s generous support, via sponsorship, ticket sales, auction bids and donations, event proceeds totalled more than $50,000 that will go directly toward supporting WEco’s many programs to inform elected and appointed officials, water sector professionals, educators, students, and interested community members. Mark your calendars now for the 2025 President’s Reception, tentatively planned for Sept. 10, 2025.
Doug Kemper stands on stage as he accepts Water Education Colorado’s 2024 Diane Hoppe Leadership Award. Kemper retired this fall after leading the Colorado Water Congress for the past 19 years. Photo courtesy of Water Education Colorado
“I believe it’s important to keep learning throughout one’s career.” —Doug Kemper
At this year’s reception, Water Education Colorado recognized Doug Kemper with the 2024 Diane Hoppe Leadership award. Doug served since 2005 as
the Executive Director of the Colorado Water Congress, where he fostered an increasingly diverse and inclusive community and meaningful collaboration.
After a 44-year career in Colorado water, he retired this fall to spend time pursuing hobbies ranging from playingexotic instruments and serving as a church elder to hiking and skiing. He’s also looking forward to spending more time with his family.
Doug never set out to lead the Colorado Water Congress, but doing so has fit perfectly with his passion for working through politically and technically complex situations involving a multitude of interests to find common ground.
Doug first took the helm at Colorado Water Congress after the previous director, Dick MacRavey, retired after 26 years. Doug had already served on the water congress board.
During his nearly two decades at Colorado Water Congress, Doug was able to take an established organization — it officially formed in 1958 — further build its reputation, and use it as an organizing tool to, in his words “continue to advance the integrity of what we do in Colorado water. It can be a high-conflict environment but it can also be very rewarding as we seek to find these optimal solutions that balance a wide range of diverse interests. Participating and contributing to these collaborative processes has been the joy of my career.”
His priorities have centered around three main things. First, to “build up our conferences, which were dying when I came on. Bored at too many conferences, I wanted to put on events I would enjoy attending.” Second, to maintain water congress’s highly successful legislative record. And finally, to achieve financial stability for the organization. On all fronts, he’s found success, and he credits that success to support and participation from the Colorado
Water Congress Board and the water community.
Prior to taking the helm at Colorado Water Congress in 2005, Doug spent 20 years as the water resources manager with Aurora Water.
During his time at Aurora, he experienced the demise of the Two Forks project, when it was vetoed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1990. He describes a “black, dark cloud” that descended for Aurora and other project proponents whose water supply plans were thrown into uncertainty. “The future and what people had been working on intensively for a decade wasn’t going to happen. It became clear that whatever was going to happen would require a rethinking of water policy.”
With other large water supply projects stalled or failing, and recognizing the need for a new approach and new skills, Doug attended courses at the Harvard Program on Negotiation. There, he learned about finding common ground, managing conflict, and working with diverse interests to get things done. “To me, that was magic.”
He also went through training in collaborative decision-making at (now-called) CDR Associates in Boulder and consent-building at the Institute for Participatory Management and Planning run by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. “I believe it is important to keep learning throughout one’s career. There is often a better way of finding optimal solutions to conflict and that can begin with a deep understanding of the points of view of others,” explains Doug.
“Those things became the core of my life, they guided how I spent my career,” where Doug says his proudest accomplishments involved working with local communities to take difficult situations and make them better. This work included developing several intergovernmental agreements in a variety of
Colorado’s geographic areas such as the Eagle River headwaters, Upper Arkansas Valley, Lower Arkansas Valley and the Denver metro area.
At Aurora Water, Doug also met and married Jill Piatt Kemper. He has two children from his first marriage. His son, Ben, is in the Air Force Special Forces and lives with his wife and four children — they’re expecting their fifth — in Monterey, California. His daughter, Cayla, and her husband, Justin, live in Westminster, where she works as a project manager for a renewable energy company.
Thinking about retirement, Doug says he looks forward to “letting things roll and having a clean calendar for a while.”
He hopes to stay involved in Colorado water, a community he’s proud to be part of. “A lot that’s talked about with water is conflict,” he says, “but the real story of Colorado’s water community is how well we have risen to meet the challenges of
the day. Our journey is a joy.”
Becky Mitchell, the State of Colorado’s Colorado River Commissioner, stands
with Lorelei Cloud as Cloud accepts Water Education Colorado’s 2024 Greg Hobbs Next Wave Leadership Award. Photo courtesy of Water Education Colorado
Lorelei Cloud received WEco’s 2024 Greg Hobbs Next Wave Leadership Award. Lorelei, who is vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, made history in March 2023 as the first Native American to be appointed to the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). She currently serves as vice-chair of the board and represents the Southwest Basin’s San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan rivers.
Between these dual leadership roles and others — Lorelei also serves as co-founder and now former co-chair for the Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network and as a leadership team member for the Water and Tribes Initiative — Lorelei is committed to empowering young female leaders and to acting on behalf of her tribe to strengthen both sovereignty and water security.
Her top priority has been preserving Southern Ute tribal water and developing that water. “The only way we’re going to protect it is to develop it. We’ve been disenfranchised since the creation of our reservation, and the development of our water is part of that.”
Along with the history making leap to serve on the CWCB, Lorelei’s proudest accomplishments include establishing a Memorandum of Understanding, signed in April 2024, with the four Upper Basin states of the Colorado River Basin and the six Upper Basin tribes, with regard to the Colorado River. The MOU outlines a commitment to information-sharing, and to identifying and cooperating to address issues of mutual concern.
Lorelei spends a good deal of time educating others on Ute history, sovereignty, and belief systems. “There is a lack of knowledge with how tribes work within the government structure,” she explains. And, “There is this colonized view of nature and land, where everything has to have ownership. But why, why does that have to happen?”
“We came from our Creator, and there are all of these things he gave us to take care of … every blade of grass, every ounce of water has a spirit. There is a divine love between humans and Nature. It changes your view of the world. It changes how you see the essence of life.”
Part of her message is that the Ute people have always been here on this land and will continue to fight to be here. But at the same time, her belief in our shared fate undergirds her spirit of collaboration: “We’re all in this together. My environment is your environment and yours is mine. Your future is my future, and my future is your future.”
Looking ahead, Lorelei is committed to ensuring tribes are included in every conversation with the state. And she sees an opportunity to further influence
the structure and makeup of the CWCB. “There is another sovereign nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, that should have a seat on the CWCB to be able to represent themselves.”
Summing it up, Lorelei says of her life and career to date: “I’ve always been a water protector. I just needed a chance to show it.”
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