California Forward

California Forward advocates for shared prosperity across all of California’s regions, and for improved government performance and accountability. California Forward hosts the California Economic Summit, a robust network that concentrates on ensuring all Californians have access to economic opportunity, stable housing, quality jobs, and a healthy environment. This grant supports California Forward’s ongoing efforts to generate solutions to the state’s wildfire crisis. (Substrategy: Wildfire)

California Forward will support Sonoma County’s recovery from the October 2017 wildfires by providing policy analysis and technical support to the County of Sonoma and the City of Santa Rosa as they develop a county-wide agenda for meeting the housing needs for economic and community recovery. California Forward will provide analysis of effective government structures for joint decision making by the city and county, which will be necessary to regionalize housing production; pool and leverage financing and funding; share risks and benefits of development; streamline environmental review; and make equity, affordability, and climate solutions central to the recovery.

Across sectors, ideology, and geography, reformers are working to advance policies to improve the overall health of democracy. Many of these actors remain unconnected, and few have a big-picture view of reform efforts across the 50 states. With this grant, California Forward and its partners will benchmark the status of reforms and reform efforts at the state and local levels in a "State of the Field" document. The partners will then convene an initial session of key champions on January 26, 2017, in San Francisco to explore the dynamics of reform efforts in campaign finance, redistricting, voting, and primary processes, and to explore options for developing a support network for reform leaders and organizations moving forward.