Puget Sound Sage combines research, innovative public policy and organizing to ensure all people have an affordable place to live, a good job, a clean, healthy environment, and access to public transportation. Our work has impacted thousands of workers by ensuring: workers have power and a voice in the workplace; working people have living wages, health care and dignity; people live in healthy com
munities where there are good jobs, affordable housing, clean air and accessible transit; and an effective government that provides for the common good of workers and communities. We achieve our mission through our four core programs:
Climate Justice
Sage centers communities disproportionately impacted by climate change at the center of climate resiliency strategies. In order to build climate resilience throughout our communities, our climate justice program focuses on addressing existing vulnerabilities while also fundamentally shifting the approach that local, regional and state governments take to addressing climate change to an equity-first approach. Program accomplishments include:
- Partnering with immigrant truck drivers and South Seattle residents to reduce diesel pollution in the Duwamish Valley.
- Releasing a community-based participatory research report Our People, Our Power, Our Planet, detailing community concerns about climate adaptation, decreasing carbon pollution and ensuring equitable representation from their base in policy development.
- Co-chairing the City of Seattle Equity & Environment Initiative, resulting in the Equity & Environment Agenda and creation of an Environmental Justice Steering Committee. Equitable Development
We advocate for affordable housing as a central component of community-based development that is based on community needs, assets and inspiration. While displacement is fundamentally about housing, it is also about how communities cohere together. Traditional planning efforts fail to acknowledge the role of anchoring communities of color, immigrants, and refugees around culturally relevant businesses, community centers, faith institutions and service providers. Our equitable development program advances policies that support compact, high-density development and affordable housing along transit corridors to prevent displacement, which is core to healthy, climate-resilient communities. Program accomplishments include:
- Securing millions in public funding for affordable housing.
- Co-leading our Transit for All campaign, with Transportation Choices Coalition and One America, to secure new transit investments, improved bus service, and the successful implementation of ORCA Lift, the nationally recognized new low income fare.
- Convening South Communities Organizing for Racial & Regional Equity (SouthCORE), a multi-racial coalition of twenty community and member-based organizations that serve as an organized voice for community-led growth and development in South King County. Good Jobs and Workers' Rights
Sage is on the forefront of a renewed movement for economic justice in our region. We reduce inequality by advancing policy, such as minimum wage, paid sick leave, access to full time jobs, enforcement of good job standards, and placement of people with barriers to employment in public worker construction jobs. Program accomplishments include:
- Passing $15 Minimum Wage and Paid Sick & Safe Days ordinances in Seattle.
- Advancing labor standards for 6,000 airport related jobs in SeaTac.
- Convening the Interfaith Economic Justice Coalition, comprised of interfaith leaders from the region as a means of uplifting worker issues for the public, organizing support in faith communities, and helping build power in worker organizing.
- In collaboration with our partners, winning the City of Seattle Priority Hire Ordinance for local workers to enter into green construction careers. Leadership Development
We advocate for planning and policy that makes racial and social equity a top goal for decision makers at all levels of government. We believe that communities of color can prosper in place by harnessing market forces and public investment, with their own vision for growth at the center of local planning. However, lack of decision-making power and capacity to engage in long-term planning greatly hinders our capacity to influence policy in the region. Our leadership development program is dedicated to providing emerging leaders from low-income communities and communities of color the training and opportunities they need to have a seat at decision making tables, laying long-term groundwork for achieving solutions based on community needs. Program accomplishments include:
- Launching our Community Leadership Institute (CLI), a fellowship program that supports, trains and places emerging leaders from low-income communities and communities of color to sit on local boards and commissions.
- Succeeding in placing seven cohort members on local boards and commissions less than four months following the graduation of our 2015-2016 CLI cohort. Of the seven placements, four women of color have won appointments to boards and commissions, such as the Seattle Women’s Commission, Move Seattle Levy Oversight Committee, and the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board, and one man of color won appointment on the City of Seattle Planning Commission.
