As candidate for Colorado House District 49, Max Woodfin brings a wealth of leadership experience. Max is a mental health counselor, educator, and Army veteran. He has been in private practice as a psychotherapist for over a decade and collaborates with first responder agencies to provide mental health care and education to police, firefighters, park rangers, and others on the front lines of our nation’s natural and human-caused disasters. Max served in the Colorado Army National Guard for nearly 10 years and most recently deployed to eastern Europe from 2021-2022 as a company commander and leader of a multinational NATO liaison team.
“Coloradans have capacity for complex and hard conversations, but recently politics have become more about divisive sound bites and viral messaging. I am ready for a democracy where we can have open dialogue and solve problems together.”
Prior to becoming a counselor, Max was a high school English teacher and program director for an international education program. For nearly a decade he taught small groups of high school and college students in remote parts of Asia, including China, Tibet, India, Laos, and Thailand. Seeing low-income high school students thrive when they could pursue their passions, Max adopted a view on education that stands up against a status quo where students are measured in numbers rather than the quality of who they are.
“Education needs to be about the individual student. It cannot be one-size-fits-all. Students get lost in that system. We know there is a better system where even the most nontraditional students thrive and succeed.”
Max also understands the importance of our public lands and the natural world. His undergraduate degree in Human Ecology and he sees the way that exposure to the natural world helps people feel more connected to themselves and something greater, and that this connection is essential to keeping our world healthy. He grew up with a small barnyard surrounded by hills and woods, and ascribes his resilient spirit to the amount of independence he had during childhood. He puts this into practice as a counselor, extending his office into the outdoors and taking the time to help his clients and patients connect with their deeper mission in life.
“We need to break the stigma of mental health care. Sometimes when I work with patients, this means walking out of the office together and connecting with nature on the land. This creates a sense of normalcy no matter what people are dealing with.”
Inspired by those who came before him, service is deeply embedded in Max’s worldview. His grandmother served as a member of a town council in the segregated south; she was the one woman on that council who stood up against segregation. His father was the director of a nonprofit and his mother was a proud community college professor who believed deeply in bringing quality education to first generation college students.
Max is nonconventional and an independent thinker. While he has deep-seated values and beliefs, he will not simply toe a party line or subscribe to oversimplified ideas. He has never conformed to the norm, nor does he think it is healthy to engage in maladaptive tendencies of a dominant culture — whether that is the dominant national culture or a political party culture. With this in mind, he embraces our society’s potential to bring out the best in humanity.
“Being partisan has become a cultural habit, and each party is becoming representative of cultural encampments rather than principled policy platforms. I can fix my own tractor, serve my country proudly in the military, and hunt for my own food and still be a diehard Democrat…and that should not strike anyone as strange, but sometimes it does.”
