Our Priorities

Why It's Important: Climate change is not on the way; it's here. Wildfires on the west coast burned twice as many acres as they did in 1970. Since 1980, the planet has had a 50-fold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves. Hurricanes, droughts, sea level rise, war and conflict, and diseases are all increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change.

Our Stance: We need a Green New Deal. What does this mean? Legislation that meets the moment. Science says we need bold, ambitious legislation to halve our emissions in the next decade. We believe we can do this in a way that uplifts everyone. A Green New Deal that improves our health, creates millions of good paying union jobs, expands public transportation, expands wind and solar power, and protects the planet is the best way forward. Supporting Land Back efforts. 

What We Advocate For:

• End fracking
• Establish affordable, energy efficient, zero carbon housing
• Allocate resources to Indigenous communities to lead the effort of planting billions of trees, renewing our soils, rehabilitating wetlands, and implementing TEK (traditional ecological knowledge)
• Establish distributed wind and solar power
• Establish a modernized, clean, energy efficient electric grid
• Expand public transportation and biking/pedestrian infrastructure
• Protecting public lands
• Creating green spaces
• Clean drinking water made easily accessible for all
• Establishing Cumulative Impact in the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent additional industries from encroaching on communities impacted by existing pollution
• Combating and understanding environmental racism
• Establishing democratized public-owned utilities
• Prevent the exploitation of lands in our expansion of clean energy (i.e. no building solar farms through the destruction of deserts)
• Implementing intersectional climate education in schools

Why It's Important: We are living in a country that values profit over people. Approximately two-thirds of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Wages have stagnated despite inflation and productivity gains. America’s largest companies like Amazon and Starbucks rake in billions in profits while aggressively suppressing unionization efforts.   

Our Stance: We need people-first politics. Ensuring that we live in a country that prioritizes the everyday American does not hurt the economy, rather the opposite. Uplifting everyone is how we create a long-term, sustainable economy in which all people can thrive. This is not a matter of cost; this is a matter of what we choose to prioritize, and for far too long, this country has not prioritized the working class, the backbone of this country.

What We Advocate For:

• Raise the minimum wage to account for inflation and productivity gains over the last 50 years
• Establish a Federal Job Guarantee
• Increase and encourage unionization efforts
• Increase funding to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to better hold union-busting corporations accountable
• Expand Social Security
• Expand rent control
• Establish a 4-day work week
• Establish universal and free broadband for all
• Increase the corporate tax rate and establish a wealth tax on the ultra-rich to fund necessary social programs across the country

Why It's Important: Rights for women and gender minorities have long been neglected in the United States, as several states are aiming to eliminate their bodily autonomy and politicize gender equality.

Our Stance: We must safeguard and bolster gender equality on all fronts, namely where it intersects with health and economic justice. This includes equalizing our spaces by ensuring the needs of menstruators, parents, and more.

What We Advocate For: 

• Codify Roe V. Wade and safeguard the right to travel for abortion care 
• Establish universal childcare
• Expand paid parental leave
• Expand access to safe abortions
• Reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act
• End the tampon tax
• Make menstrual products available in government-funded areas (e.g. schools)
• Abolish parental consent laws and reform judicial bypass 
• Repeal the Hyde amendment 
• Reform and invest in the foster care and adoption system to combat sex trafficking, child abuse, and neglect 
• Ending of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People epidemic
• Enforcement of the Garza notice by explicitly protecting the reproductive freedom of immigrants and asylum seekers 
• End forced sterilization and prosecute abuse toward detained individuals
• Restorative justice for victims of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment – including access to medical care, mental health resources, and long-term structural support 
• Outlaw inmate-detainee relations, and enforce the Prison Rape Elimination Act

Why It's Important: At a moment where millions of Gen-Z are becoming eligible to vote, states are passing a number of discriminatory laws to increase voter suppression. 

Our Stance: We must make voting accessible, simple, free, and fair. Simple as that.

What We Advocate For:

• Passage of federal legislation to safeguard voting rights such as the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
• Working towards getting money out of our elections
• Abolish the filibuster
• Expansion of same-day registration, online voter registration, mail-in voting, and voter pre-registration
• Ban voter ID Laws
• End gerrymandering
• Enforcement of Public School Voter Registration Opportunities  
• Allow 16 and 17 year old’s to pre-register to vote in elections after they’ve turned 18
• Hold those who illegally purge voters from voter rolls accountable
• Reform judicial laws to prevent the judicial system from being used to unconstitutionally overturn elections 
• Pass federal legislation to apply an ethical code to the Supreme Court of the United States and prevent justices from lobbying and bypassing federal lobbying laws

Why It's Important: More so than any previous generation, Gen-Z has a substantial population that identifies as LGBTQ+, a population that is likely to increase over time.

Our Stance: It is incredibly important to safeguard the civil rights and liberties of LGBTQ+ folks. We must implement legislation for issues that affect the community, which we must examine from an intersectional lens. This includes equal access to quality healthcare free of discrimination, inclusive, gender-neutral bathrooms in public facilities, access to affordable housing, and more.

What We Advocate For: 

• Passage of the Equality Act and Equal Rights Amendment
• Provide affordable housing for all
• Abolish homelessness
• Reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act 
• Protect access to Gender Affirming care 
• Reform homophobic medical laws that prohibit LGBTQ+ individuals from accessing or facilitating healthcare, such as donating blood.

Why It's Important: Gun violence is an epidemic that our country continues to endure. Over half of Americans support stricter, safer gun laws, and yet Congress has failed to enact any substantial form of gun control in decades. 

Our Stance: A teenager with suicidal thoughts should not have such easy access to a gun. Children should not have to do active shooter drills before they can even read. Our most marginalized communities are hurting from a lack of action on gun reform.

What We Advocate For:

• Expand and enforce universal background checks
• Provide universal mental health care
• Establish red flag laws
• Combat the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) on elected officials by reversing Citizens United
• End gun show loopholes

Why It's Important: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the systemic flaws in our healthcare system. Over 30 million Americans — disproportionately Black and Brown Americans —  are uninsured, and for those with insurance, costs are still so high that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the country. 1 in 6 Americans have past-due medical debt

Our Stance: No American should lack healthcare in the richest country in the world. No one should lose their healthcare because they are unable to work, especially in a global health crisis.

What We Advocate For:

• Establish universal, single-payer health care, including affordable and accessible mental health services and substance abuse treatment
• Establish a cap on how much Americans pay for prescription drugs
• End all outstanding medical debt
• Paid medical leave
• Allow Medicare to negotiate drug pricing (while simultaneously advocating for a single-payer health care system)

Why It’s Important: Indigenous communities across the country have been abused and neglected since the founding of the United States. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and over half have experienced sexual violence. Despite Indigenous people disproportionately being the ones risking their safety to protect the land, water, and resources we all use, this country continues to ignore Native treaties for the sake of perpetual economic growth.

Our Stance: Supporting Indigenous peoples means looking inward and seeing how American policy actively harms Indigenous communities, from honoring treaties to, more broadly, combating climate change in the most aggressive way possible. 

What We Advocate For:

• End Line 3 and phase out all existing and future oil and natural gas projects
• Ban fracking
• Honor Indigenous tribal treaty rights and sovereignty
• Reauthorize and expand the Violence Against Women Act
• Combat the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
• Devolve control of public lands to indigenous communities in the region

Why It's Important: The effects of this country’s continuous efforts to oppress Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities are without a doubt present today. Racism is deeply rooted in our education system, health care system, policing and prison systems, electoral system, and our foreign affairs.

Our Stance: In order to truly eliminate the racism that is so embedded within our country, we must target the systems through which racism is so pervasive and work to repair the damages of slavery and reverse the damages caused by Jim Crow laws, redlining, the War and Drugs, and more. This means being critical of institutions that have historically and systemically harmed communities of color. 

What We Advocate For: 

• Reallocate local police budgets and funding social and health programs that have proven to deter crime
• End racial discrimination in finance, education, healthcare, and more 
• End mass incarceration and the criminalization of homelessness, addiction, and more
• Legalize marijuana federally
• Ban voter ID laws
• End for-profit prisons 
• End cash bail
• End anti-Asian (particularly anti-China) narratives in the press, media, and the government 
• Support HBCUs and HSIs 
• End de-facto school segregation 
• Safeguard affirmative action
• Expand community Policing initiatives
• Expanding language accessibility within the criminal justice system

Why It’s Important: This country’s mistreatment of immigrants did not start or end with the Trump Administration. Immigrants continue to face incredibly strenuous barriers to entering and thriving in the United States. Further, with the intensifying climate crisis, experts are projecting millions of climate refugees coming to the U.S. every year. 

Our Stance: Immigrants should be welcomed into this country and given the resources and opportunities needed for them to prosper. 

What We Advocate For:

• Establishing a path to citizenship for DACA and all undocumented immigrants
• Ensuring refugees are given asylum
• Abolish ICE
• Reunite families separated during the Trump Administration’s “Zero Tolerance” Immigration policy
• Dismantle deportation centers and programs
• Eliminate all barriers including the cost of applying for green cards, asylum, etc