Amy Oliver Cooke is the director of the Energy Policy Center and the Colorado Transparency Project. She is also the founder of Mothers Against Debt (MAD).
Amy has been with II since 2004, beginning in operations and moving to the policy side in 2008. Under Amy's direction, the Energy Policy Center advances a free market approach to Colorado's energy issues. For her work on transparency, Amy investigates government spending at all levels and explains its impact on family budgets. This work earned her an appointment to the Long Term Fiscal Stability Commission from House Minority Leader Mike May.
Amy is the host of the award winning Amy Oliver Show heard on News Talk 1310 KFKA Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 am. In 2008, the Colorado Broadcasters Association (CBA) recognized her as the best "News Talk Personality in a major Market." The CBA recognized her again in 2010, with "The Award of Merit for Best News Talk Personality in a Major Market."
Her first MAD video "Baby ball-and-chain," designed to draw attention to what government spending is doing to our children's national debt, garnered national attention on Fox and Friends and continues to dominate search engines and YouTube. Another MAD video titled "Fiscal Child Abuse" placed 7th overall in the national PowerLine Blog contest illustrating our national debt.
Amy started Citizen Auditors, where she travels around the state training residents how to examine local, school district, and state government spending. It's a free market approach to grassroots activism. She drew upon her own expertise and founded Citizens Against School Bullies, to battle and, ultimately, defeat a local $16 million tax increase despite being out spent 90 to 1.
Amy has written numerous opinion editorials, issue papers, and issue backgrounders on transparency, energy, and fiscal policy. She's been published on Townhall.com, Liberty Ink Journal, and Save Our States, and published in the Denver Post, Denver Business Journal, Pueblo Chieftain, Colorado Springs Gazette, Steamboat Pilot, Greeley Tribune, and the Denver Daily News. In addition, she contributes to three blogs including energy.i2i.org, transparency.i2i.org (COST), and MothersAgainstDebt.com.
Amy's paper titled Unabashed Bias exposed how the Denver daily papers campaigned for rather than reported on Colorado's largest tax increase and won her "Best Right-Wing Media Criticism" from the Denver Westword.
Amy earned a degree in journalism in 1985 from the prestigious University of Missouri-Columbia. In 2003, she earned a graduate degree in American History from the University of Northern Colorado.
