The State Innovation Exchange (SiX) is in regular communication with more than 4,000 state legislators and their legislative staffers across the country. Last year, more than 1,000 state legislators participated in a SiX training—Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike.
SiX’s co-executive director, Jessie Ulibarri, told Blue Tent his organization has directors in 10 states, but that SiX also has national programming “that reaches folks across the country,” “touching” legislators in all 50 states.
But whatever you do, don’t characterize SiX as “the Democrats’ ALEC,” (the American Legislative Exchange Council) as The New Republic did in an article at the beginning of the year. Both organizations focus on state legislatures, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Not the progressive ALEC
“ALEC is a space where a bunch of folks write stuff that they pass on to other legislators without necessarily much thought about [whether] that legislation makes sense for particular states,” said Michigan state Sen. Erika Geiss. Geiss is a trainer with the Progressive Governance Academy, a partnership between SiX, re:Power, and Local Progress.
“[SiX] is really more about, how do you thoughtfully and surgically utilize the information that’s there, and the research that goes behind legislation, and how do you then use that so that you can create policy in your state?” she added.
“When we talk about governing from the inside of state legislatures [for policies that] center on people, we’re talking about values-driven governance,” SiX co-Executive Director Neha Patel said. So when people say that the left needs its own ALEC, Patel said that by using the “same tactics, same resources and the same approaches” as the other side, “we will still end up leaving out [the people we claim we’re centering in our policy]. What we’re looking for is value-centered, people-centered, progressive policy.”
That approach is far from the only difference between SiX and ALEC, a “pay for play” organization in which corporate influencers pay for access to state legislators. More recently, while legislators who receive support from SiX were working to expand paid sick leave and, in Colorado, passed the first law eliminating qualified immunity for the state’s police, ALEC was working with the GOP to give corporations immunity from responsibility for failing to prevent workers’ COVID-related illnesses and deaths.
State government is where life-changing policy happens quickly
Despite the difference in priorities and tactics, ALEC and SiX do agree on one point: the importance of state governments in driving change.
“SiX focuses on building power from the state outward because we see regularly that public policy that improves people’s lives happens quickly in state legislatures across the country regardless of partisan control,” Ulibarri said, citing Colorado’s repeal of qualified immunity, Nebraska’s repeal of the death penalty, and ballot measures that increased the minimum wage in Florida and expanded Medicaid in Oklahoma as examples. “At the state level, those policies really do have immediate and direct impacts on people’s lives.”
SiX provides a wide range of services and affinity groups to legislators, from its Progressive Governance Academy to directly providing legislators research and policy, and communications support. All of its efforts have one goal: to provide state legislators with effective tools and strategies to advance progressive legislation and push back against harmful bills like those pushed by ALEC.
Working with state legislators to make change
SiX has supported Colorado state Sen. Julie Gonzalez with everything from messaging support to guidance as her state legislature’s Latino Caucus has grown. That support has included connecting Gonzalez to other state legislators who are working on similar issues. SiX, Gonzalez told Blue Tent, sets up calls between legislators so they can “compare apples to apples and see if there’s a common pathway forward” with legislation they’re working on in their respective states.
Gonzalez said she has found SiX’s messaging support and their research particularly helpful. SiX will tell her, for example, “here’s how to talk about this super-wonky policy issue in a way that, quite frankly, your colleagues and the public can understand,” Gonzalez explained.
SiX also understands the dynamic “under the dome,” she added.
“For better or worse, us legislators, we often have the attention spans of fruit flies,” she said, for reasons including being under-resourced, having several constituencies simultaneously vying for their attention, and the sheer number of bills they’re required to consider in a given year—“in Colorado, four, five, 600 bills every year.”
“I think SiX really understands that and tries to provide us as legislators with the tools that we need so that we can be most effective, so we can hone in our focus and be able to dig in on the policy.”
SiX’s Ulibarri, a former Colorado state senator, said that his organization’s work with legislators focuses not just on the mechanics of making policy, but also on both strategy and creating a “broader vision” for their work.
“When you’re a new legislator and you start in the state capitol, it can be a whirlwind of activity,” he said, during which new lawmakers are required to learn everything from new parliamentary procedures and committee structures to becoming experts on “every single department within a state, how budgets work, the governor’s unique demands and needs, and then all of the interests that are trying to shape public policy and public resources.”
“The mechanics are important to understand,” but knowing the mechanics without also developing a strategy and broader vision can leave new legislators stumbling for their first few years “because it’s a really dynamic environment,” Ulibarri said.
Long-term funding for “generational change”
SiX’s “dynamic vision” also extends to the way its leaders seek funding. In 2018, SiX’s (c)3 pulled in $5.5 million in grants and donations, according to public tax filings. The majority of its funding comes from independent foundations, followed by community foundations and public charities.
Founded in 2014 in a merger of several failed nonprofits with similar missions, SiX co-Executive Director Patel explained that in the beginning, the group received “a lot of unrestricted money from labor institutions or labor partners, institutional gifts, and some unrestricted funding from larger donors who were interested in the state governing side.”
Since then, she said, SiX has moved away from year-to-year funding and into a “multi-year, multi-stream funding picture that doesn’t put the risks in any one place. So there’s a role that the individual [donors] can play. There’s a role that the institutional partners can play. And there’s a role that the foundations play.”
Both donor-advised funds and foundations have been responding, tax records show. The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, a donor-advised fund that allows donors to remain anonymous, has given SiX three grants worth more than four and a half million. Wellspring Philanthropic Fund has provided 2 grants for a total of $1 million, with smaller (six-figure) investments coming from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the National Education Association, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and others.
Part of the reason for the switch has been SiX’s emphasis on “generational change.”
Instead of being awarded money for a year-long project and then evaluated on their progress, Patel said, “We have to redefine what winning actually looks like,” including the fact that current staff and funders may not be around to see the fruits of their labors — in part because the work is incremental, and in part because winning “is going to look different in every single state that we work in.”
In addition, she added, change doesn’t end with passing a policy. “Because you’ve passed a policy doesn’t mean you’ve changed or won anything at all. How do you implement it? How do you sustain it? And those are the kinds of solutions, those innovative solutions, that our partners and our funders are interested in.”
