FY17: We Scored Some Touchdowns, but We Didn’t Win the Game

By Monica Kamen

Each year, The DC Fair Budget Coalition puts together a policy platform that calls on the city to both protect prior investments and substantially increase investments across a range of human services. While we craft this agenda, we always navigate a challenging philosophical problem: do we ask for what we think we can win, or do we demand what is truly needed to address poverty in the District? On one hand, it’s important to recognize the political and fiscal realities of our city in order to actually secure investments in critical programs. But on the other, a politically realistic ask will never do the job of bringing justice to the people of our city.

The FY17 Budget Campaign was no different; we crafted an ambitious yet reasonable policy agenda. And now that the FY17 budget has been finalized, it is clear that we were able to secure undeniably critical funding for programs that will help thousands of DC residents.

Collectively, our coalition and its members won funding for programs that will provide housing for 569 individuals and 304 families. Our advocacy helped secure $15 million to repair dilapidated and decaying public housing, protected and expanded programs that provide access to healthy and affordable food, protected funding for services for survivors of domestic violence, and extended TANF benefits for another year for families who would have otherwise been cut off from all cash assistance and services. If we compare this year’s budget to that from even two or three years ago, it is clear that we are slowly forcing the city to grapple with some of its biggest problems and start prioritizing investments in affordable housing, adult education, jobs, and health.

And yet, when we take a step back, these victories seem to pale in comparison to the sobering reality of poverty in the District. In this city, there are almost 8,000 people experiencing homelessness on a given night and over 38,000 people waiting on a closed waitlist for housing. One in three children live in a household struggling with hunger, and over 33,000 domestic-violence-related calls are made to the police in a given year. Roughly 60,000 adults lack a high school credential, and one in four adults with a high school credential are unemployed. These statistics go on and on. This gross lack of access to economic, housing, and food security is highly concentrated in communities of color, making the budget an issue of basic racial justice when the city prioritizes the needs of its White residents over Black and Brown citizens.

We may have scored a few touchdowns this budget season, but it is clear that we have a lot of work to do to win the game. We look forward to crafting a policy agenda and running a budget campaign that makes the work of justice an inevitable political reality.