Katie Raitz

Katie Raitz, 20, is a junior at CU Boulder pursuing a bachelor’s degree in ethnic and women and gender studies with an emphasis on education. As a Puksta Scholar, she organizes youth in her community to create peer-to-peer sexual health classes and teaching materials, through the organization Sex Eq (formerly called Relation Education By Teens For Teens). She plans to continue her work with Sex Eq while at Watson, where she’ll be exploring models for sustaining and growing the organization. Katie is passionate about empowering young people to advocate for their community’s sexual rights because she understands that people alienated from their bodies are disenfranchised. To challenge and transform the disempowering way sex education is often taught, Sex Eq utilizes a peer-to-peer teaching model to reestablish young people as the experts of their own experiences.

Additionally, while at Watson, Katie will be working on her campus to help advocate for the majority of CU students who voted to divest from the fossil fuel industry. As a member of Arts and Sciences student government, Katie embraces her duty to support the student voice, and will therefore be mobilizing students and administrators on her campus to achieve the goal of a sustainable and locally invested CU.