Creating a more just and equitable state
In 2006, a visionary group of public policy experts, community leaders, and social justice advocates founded the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to building a stronger, more equitable state. They were guided by the belief that everyone deserves to have access to opportunity and that we can all work together to build a budget, economy, and tax code that serves everyone.
Today, we leverage research and policy analysis, narrative building, outreach, and advocacy to advance racially just economic policy and tribal sovereignty in Washington. We work with a wide range of partners and grassroots coalitions to move our policy priorities forward. Some of our recent successes include:
- Developing the policy framework that led to our state’s new capital gains excise tax, which raised over $1 billion in the first two years to fund investments in early learning and schools.
- Co-leading the coalition that won the passage of the Working Families Tax Credit, a tax credit for low-income households. In its first two years, this tax credit has resulted in more than $200 million in direct cash payments to hundreds of thousands of households in Washington state.
- Working with partners to eliminate inequitable legal financial obligations for youth in Washington state and ensuring that any debt from these harmful fines and fees are erased from their records.
Read more about our impact in 2023.
Guided by anti-racist principles
Across our work, we strive to follow these principles:
- Dismantling racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism is essential to undoing other forms of oppression and building a more just Washington state.
- Communities who are most impacted have the best knowledge to design racially just economic policy.
- We honor tribal sovereignty and demand tribal representation in state – level policymaking.
- Public policy to reduce the racial wealth and income gap and return wealth to Black, Native, and other communities of color is necessary to ensure all Washingtonians can live with economic dignity.
- We are part of a larger movement for racially just economic policy that holds governmental decision makers accountable to the well – being of Washington communities, ensures an equitable redistribution of resources, and redresses past harms.
Learn more about us in our theory of change.
Our Mission
To use research and analysis to advance the well-being of Washington communities, improve the economic security and social opportunity of all in the state, and support the essential role of government in promoting a just and prosperous society
Our Commitment to Anti-Racism
How We Will Work to Undo White Supremacy
January 2021
Racially inequitable outcomes in health, education, and wealth and income are not random. They are the consequences of past and persistent policy and budget decisions that are embedded and reinforced in our social, economic, and political systems; our institutions; our practices; and our social and cultural norms. Our organization’s mission requires that we address the impact of economic and fiscal policies designed to maintain power and resources to whites and disenfranchise, exclude, and extract wealth from Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). To accomplish our mission, we must dismantle white supremacy within our organization – by transforming how we work together, share power, raise and manage resources, communicate with external audiences, conduct research and analysis, and develop policy.
We have upheld white supremacy
We have not done enough to dismantle systems and norms of white supremacy within our own organization and within the sphere of statewide policymaking. Some of the ways we have been complicit include:
- Upholding a culture of white supremacy within the Budget and Policy Center, including relying on staff of color to move racial equity work forward and advancing policy proposals without considering what BIPOC communities actually need or want from our work.
- Failing to confront the central role of racism and anti-Blackness in shaping public policy and government institutions, and participating in policymaking processes that impact BIPOC communities but where BIPOC communities are not authentically included.
- Not investing in building and maintaining authentic relationships with advocates and organizations that are rooted in communities most impacted by economic and fiscal policy.
- Not prioritizing and being responsible for our own learning about how systems of oppression interact with one another and how white supremacy is connected to, and reinforces, the harms of racism, wealth inequality, sexism, ableism, and other systems of oppression.
We commit to do better
We make the following commitments in how we do our research, communications, development, operations, and policy work as well as how we work together as a staff and operate internally:
- Unlearn and dismantle a culture of white supremacy within our organization.
- Work internally and with partners to disrupt the culture of white supremacy in state advocacy, lobbying, and policymaking.
- Acknowledge our own complicity in maintaining systems of oppression.
- Work to share power and decision making with organizations that focus on grassroots organizing with BIPOC communities.
- Approach our work with an analysis of how systems of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and classism work together to create overlapping and interdependent systems of injustice.
We must commit to anti-racism immediately and use our own organizational transformation as the foundation for dismantling white supremacy in statewide economic and fiscal policymaking.
We invite your feedback with us as we continue to learn, grow, and live out this commitment across our work. Please contact us by emailing bnpinfo@budgetandpolicy.org or by reaching out to a member of our team.