Victories

The Alliance for a Just Society works to develop strong grassroots organizations that transform their communities, making them more equitable and just.

With our strong organizing, policy, and communications teams, the Alliance centralizes the tools that transform grassroots leaders' passion into the power to effect policy change.

Through our investments, we and our partners have achieved many victories since our founding in 1993. The following are just a few examples:

Bringing the promise of health to all

• Contributed to the passage of historic health care legislation by playing a leadership role in the Health Care for America Now campaign. The Alliance put organizers on the ground around the country, researched insurance company abuses, and mobilized small business leaders. The historic health care legislation will guarantee affordable health coverage to millions, set new rules for insurance companies, and take important steps toward addressing racial inequities in health.
• Won expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program, including lifting barriers that left many immigrant children without health care
• Working with grassroots Native leaders, helped secure inclusion of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in federal health reform legislation
• Secured agreements from hospitals in Idaho and Washington to give quality treatment to all their patients by providing interpretation, translation, and financial assistance
• Won state legislation increasing oversight of private insurance companies, expanding coverage, and reducing costs of prescription drugs
• Founded the Health Rights Organizing Project, a national network of grassroots organizations dedicated to health for all

Building welcoming communities

• Trained hundreds of grassroots leaders to hold conversations on immigration and community values among their friends, families, and neighbors.
• Developed and distributed nationwide an immigration board game that is transforming the way people think about our immigration system
• In Boise, Idaho, led the organizing of an unprecedented, 15,000-person march, in support comprehensive immigration reform, in Boise. And, in Seattle, helped diverse immigrant groups organize two 50,000 person marches.

Protecting wages and budgets

• Won farmworker minimum wage and farm labor contracting bonding protections in Idaho, living wage ordinances in Montana and Oregon, and the indexing of the minimum wage to inflation in Washington
• Blocked utility rate hikes and expanded consumer protections in Idaho

Fighting for nutritious food

• Won improvements to the federal Food Stamp Program, including removal of eligibility barriers for many immigrants
• Crafted model access-to-benefits campaigns that use innovative grassroots testing projects to document and reverse discriminatory practices in state agencies. Community groups used these projects to address under-enrollment in programs such as Food Stamps.
• Helped our affiliates win state legislation addressing hunger, such as Washington's Act for Hungry Families

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