From our founding, Alabama Arise has been strongly committed to member leadership. Directly impacted communities, our member organizations and individuals guide and decide our policy agenda.
Over the years, the way we select this agenda has changed as our work has evolved and as times change. Now we are proposing another change.
During our November board retreat, the Arise board voted to adjust the way we select our legislative agenda in 2025. This change will not go into effect until we go through issue selection next summer. We will ask you, our members, to approve this new agenda format at next year’s Annual Meeting.
What will change
We will ask members in 2025 to adopt a multiyear, broad strategic priority agenda for four years (2026-29). The strategic priorities will roughly mirror our current priority issues, but they will include multiple policy approaches under each umbrella. The seven broad issues are:
- Adequate state budgets
- Health equity
- Hunger relief
- Inclusive democracy
- Justice reform
- Tax reform
- Worker power
In recent years, Arise has advocated in all of these areas. But several of these topics were rolled under “adequate state budgets,” with no way for members to provide input or rank our priorities in these areas. Health equity, hunger relief and worker power now reflect huge areas of work for Arise that did not previously appear on our priority agenda in any clear way.
At the same time, other categories are much broader than they appear. Under the existing categories of voting rights and criminal justice reform, for example, we work on multiple bills. By renaming our categories of work using broader, values-based framing, we can include and adjust our agenda much more flexibly.
You may notice that specific issues that appear on our current agenda, like death penalty reform and criminal justice reform, will be combined in this new format. Public transportation will roll under “adequate state budgets” along with affordable housing, child care and public education – all budget priorities where we have consistently advocated for further investment. Voting rights will roll into a broader category called “inclusive democracy,” which also may include issues related to racial equity and inclusion, free speech and immigration policies.
What will stay the same
Each year, we still will ask you to propose new pieces of legislation to adopt on our agenda under these broad category headings.We still will ask you to rank the legislative priorities under each broad heading, much in the same way we did member voting this year.
And we still will ask member groups to present pieces of legislation or strategic approaches that they want us to adopt on our agenda.
If you see a broad category of work that is not reflected here that you would like to see added to Arise’s agenda, we will have a process for that as well. That process will involve a research period to assess our capacity and strategic approach more broadly. Arise staff will look into how the category may fit in with our other areas of work and report back to our membership about whether we think we strategically can undertake a new broad issue area.
Please reach out to me or our organizing team with questions or concerns about this new format. Our goal here is to include more voices in selecting Arise’s agenda, and to lift up more of the policies that you, our members, have said you value.
