(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Good evening and welcome to "Generation Rising."

I'm Anaridis Rodriguez.

Tonight we are pleased to welcome two influential leaders from the Economic Progress Institute, Nina Harrison and Hector Perez-Aponte.

The Economic Progress Institute has been a cornerstone in Rhode Island's efforts to address economic equality and foster economic growth.

For the last 25 years, the institute has spearheaded numerous initiatives aimed at improving the wellbeing of Rhode Islanders and advocating for policies that support equitable economic opportunities.

Nina and Hector, welcome.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- So great to have you both here.

- Great to be here.

- 25 years of EPI, as it's commonly known around the community.

Tell me a little bit about your roles and how long have you been at the institute.

Nina, we'll start with you.

- So I joined EPI about a year and a half ago in February, 2023.

I'd been practicing law for about 10 years before that and I'm the policy director.

And as policy director, I essentially oversee our legislative agenda, a lot of our coalition work, which is how we do most of our advocacy, creating strategies to advance our legislative agenda, and also trying to make sure I keep connected to the community so that we can be responsive to their needs.

- And what about you, Hector?

- Yeah, as racial justice policy analyst, my work is centered around working with community partners to figure out ways to further equity in our community as well as work together to close the racial wealth gap.

So within coalitions and campaigns, such as the Equity and Impact campaign, our work there is to assist and help with the evaluation of different proposals and policies to ensure that they do further equity.

- To the layman watching, what are your key areas of focus that you can break down for us?

Because you seem like a jack of all trades, master of many.

- That's a very fair description.

Because our mission is focused on helping advance economic opportunity for all Rhode Islanders, that really does cover a lot of topics.

So we have healthcare focus, childcare and pre-K focus.

We have an access to justice focus in terms of making sure we champion things that improve democracy and make it easier to vote.

We have a tax and budget policy area where we try to make sure that taxes are fair and we're raising enough revenue to fund all of the necessary programs and infrastructure in Rhode Island.

We have equity work, where we're trying to get equity impact legislation passed, and we also have workforce development and making sure workers can earn a living wage and be treated fairly, with things like the Workforce Coalition.

- Within your research arm and your analysis, you put out a lot of reports, you analyze a lot of information, and I loved your latest report because for me, as a person who wants to be connected but doesn't necessarily have the time, it was an incredible summary of what's going on and what you can do to be engaged in the community, right?

So you were part of a team of folks who recently published the review of the 2024 legislative session.

Break it down for us with the wins and the challenges.

Let's start with the wins 'cause there were a lot of them and your team was at the helm.

- I'll let Hector start with RIPTA.

We had a big win with RIPTA this year.

- Yeah, we had 15 million was allocated toward, 15 million in ARPA funding was allocated towards the maintenance budget for RIPTA.

And so that is to maintain the services that many communities were concerned were going to be cut.

But through campaigns, such as the Save RIPTA campaign, folks came together and really pushed to make sure that the services that our community needed, such as these routes and bus maintenance and so on and so forth, that that was kept.

- Right, and also in terms of what was missed, we were asking for much more money in funding for RIPTA to expand routes and make sure that bus driver salaries are competitive.

So that's one thing.

They didn't allocate enough funding to do any expansion, but that's something that we'll be back advocating for this year.

But that was still a great win.

There were a lot of great wins this year and I think it's not only great for my work, but I think if more Rhode Islanders knew how many great things got passed, they'd feel a little bit more encouraged and hopeful about the state of politics.

So for example, the General Assembly expanded the Rhode Island Works program, which is the Cash Assistance for Needy Families program in Rhode Island.

So those benefits increased so that those families will have a little bit more cash in their pockets every month.

And the majority of people benefiting from that program are children.

We also expanded paid family leave so that if you have a new baby or if your mom or dad or child gets sick, you can now take up to eight weeks of time off to care for them instead of six weeks before, and that will be implemented incrementally until 2026.

There were a lot of wins.

Childcare, the Childcare Assistance program was also expanded so that more parents would be eligible for that, and as we know, a lot of people have been struggling to afford childcare.

So a lot of great things happened this session.

- Also multilingual learners.

Tell me about the advances in that sector for those students.

- Well, multilingual learners, unfortunately in Rhode Island, we haven't been funding them as well as many other states.

I think we were about 35th in the country in terms of how much we're funding multilingual learners.

So the win this year was that the General Assembly increased funding for multilingual learners per student.

And so that will go to increasing that budget so that they can get the things that they need to succeed.

And right now, about one in eight students in Rhode Island is a multilingual learner.

So it's a really important population that we need to make sure is getting educated properly.

- What do you think are the biggest needs that refugee and immigrant populations face when they come to Rhode Island?

Nina just mentioned that one in eight students are multilingual learners in our schools.

That's a high number.

- Yeah, that's a good question.

And I wish I could explain further on, but those needs are a little bit more layered than probably my own expertise at the moment.

I would say that a lot of the things that I've come across in my experience are just needs legally, things that, for every immigrant, the immigration process is just extremely complicated and legal needs don't come, they come far in between.

- Yeah.

- For individuals and the cost of legal expenses can be pretty high.

And then of course for folks that come from other countries, resettlement of course is a big problem with housing being a very big issue and something that, at EPI, we are going to be work working on and focusing coming into the next legislative session along with the many things that Nina has brought up as well.

- Yeah, and I guess what I'm trying to get at is, how do you bring those personal stories to the legislature to advocate for equitable policies?

How does that inform the work that you do?

- So just an example about immigration is that there are a couple of community led campaigns and we try to take our cues when we don't have expertise in the subject area, we do try to take our cues from the community.

And so we have heard from that immigrant community in Rhode Island that one of the things that's important to them is a bill to try to reduce the penalty for certain misdemeanors to 364 days instead of 365 days, because that can have a significant meaning in their immigration process.

It might still be a low level misdemeanor crime, but the fact that it's punishable by 365 days has a meaning in the immigration context.

So that's something that we're trying to learn more about because it's become important to that community.

Immigration hasn't been a focus, like primarily of EPI's work, but in the same way that we try to advance equity by looking at all communities, we're always mindful of how policies affect the immigrant community.

And another example is the Rhode Island Works program, the Cash Assistance program, does not allow legal permanent residents to apply and get those benefits until they've been residents in Rhode Island for five years.

And that has no real intention besides making it more difficult for immigrants to access those benefits, despite the fact that they're legal permanent residents in this country.

And so that's something that EPI has supported, getting rid of that five year wait time, so that more families and specifically children can get access to those benefits that they need without having to wait some unnecessary, arbitrary wait time.

- Yeah.

Let's talk about the other legislation that you are supporting that didn't necessarily make the cut.

You outlined the most pressing economic issues facing Rhode Islanders currently in this report.

And one of them that stood out to me was payday lending and the fact that proposals to regulate this sector have been going on with EPI at the forefront for 15 years, yet nothing has happened.

And I was asking myself, did I read that right?

Is that correct?

- That is correct.

I thought it was maybe just under 15, but certainly near 15.

Before that, this wasn't permitted.

Payday lending wasn't permitted in that way before about 15 years ago, at which time they created essentially a loophole for payday lenders to be able to charge interest rates that effectively are in the triple digits, about 260% APR.

And so we have been fighting against that for those past 15 years.

There's a strong coalition, there's strong support among legislators in the Senate and the House.

So it's really hard for me to say why votes haven't been allowed, with the exception of in 2023, the House did vote to end payday lending or to end the carve out allowing them to charge that triple digit interest rates.

And it passed overwhelmingly in the House, but unfortunately, there was no vote in the Senate.

And so it did not advance.

And then last year, I mean this year, this last legislative session in 2024, we had hoped to get another vote in the House since it had passed so overwhelmingly, but unfortunately the Speaker did not call it for a vote and nor did the Senate president.

And it's my understanding that the Speaker did not want to call a vote in the House without knowing that it would go somewhere in the Senate.

And neither he nor I got any indication that it would.

So it seems like it's a little bit of a bottleneck in terms of being stuck with leadership in the Senate President and Speaker of the House.

The Speaker has worked with us in the past to call a vote.

And so we're hoping to continue to applying pressure, uplifting stories from the community, which we had a lot more success with this year, and highlighting just how harmful this practice can be.

- It does, when I read the statistics, it just seems incredibly alarming and also really frustrating that something hasn't been done.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that in 30 states where payday loans are allowed, more than 2.2 billion is paid each year to folks who make an average of $25,000 a year.

I mean, that is, to me, an example of how that drives the wealth gap.

Is that a factor?

Are policies like this a factor?

- Certainly.

There's no one policy that is responsible for the racial wealth gap.

It is an amalgamation of policies over the past decades and even longer that contribute, and this is one of them.

It's an example of a policy that exploits low income people and there's also studies that show payday lenders target Black and Latino communities specifically.

So it definitely drives the racial wealth gap.

And not only that, not only is it harmful to marginalized communities and legally protected classes like Black and Latino communities, it's also harmful to the Rhode Island economy.

Those are millions of dollars, not only leaving the pockets of low-income Rhode Islanders, but leaving the Rhode Island economy because they're going straight out of state to the corporations responsible for those payday lenders.

- Hmm.

You are a nonpartisan institute.

- [Nina] Correct.

- You look at everything through an equity lens.

Off camera, we were talking about this new Equity Impact campaign that you have going on.

As you look forward into how you're going to address this particular issue, is that a focus, doing it through an equity lens moving forward?

- Certainly.

I think everything that we do at EPI takes into consideration the equity lens, and that's the driving force behind the Equity Impact campaign is incorporating a more equitable outlook and process towards the legislative, towards the legislature, so.

- How does that happen?

- Incorporating the equity lens?

- Yeah, you talked about certain statements that could be made with legislation or explain to us the process.

- So the goal for the Equity Impact campaign is, well, it's kind of a myriad of different things, but the main thing for us is incorporating what's called an equity impact statement.

And what that essentially is, is a narrative assessment of whether or not a specific policy or bill will increase, decrease, or maintain equity for any given idea.

We want to be having our legislators take serious effort to evaluate whatever they introduce into the legislature and ensure that they are taking into account the history of the issues, the intricacies and the intersectionality behind everything that could happen.

Nothing really happens in a vacuum.

And so to implement that, we wanna make sure that folks are aware of the long-term impacts and the implications of any policy that gets passed.

And that is, the purpose of the equity impact statement, is to provide a narrative assessment and have that be submitted alongside any proposal or bill and have our legislator take that time to analyze and judge whether or not this piece of proposal is worth pushing forward.

- And this is what you do face to face with legislators, right?

You try to talk to them, try to engage with them.

How do you work at the State House?

I love following you on social media because I see you guys walking in and trying to get ahold of folks who are making the decisions.

It's not easy.

- It's not easy.

The way that the General Assembly works is that they have their sessions in the evenings.

So typically, we can go to the State House in the evenings or in the afternoons and try to catch them before their session starts, when they're walking around the State House and arriving to talk to them about important issues.

We talk to them before the legislative session starts to strategize with them about how we're going to advance their bills this year.

Or in some cases, we bring them new research and say, "Hey, we think this is a really important initiative.

You should introduce a new piece of legislation that hasn't existed before."

For example, we did that last session with the child tax credit because we saw that during COVID, the federal child tax credit was so effective at reducing child poverty.

It literally cut it in half.

And then when they cut that expansion back, child poverty doubled again.

So we know just how effective that policy is at reducing child poverty and looking at that through an equity lens.

Black and Latino children in Rhode Island are more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts.

So we knew that creating a state child tax credit and finding a legislator who was willing to take that on as a new piece of legislation and a new proposal would be really powerful in terms of advancing equity and economic opportunity in Rhode Island.

- In many cases, you also need the public's help.

How do you engage the community to bring forth their own testimony, so legislators are compelled to make change?

- I think because we're not a direct services organization that can be really difficult.

So we really rely on our partners.

We do all of our advocacy work through coalitions.

So we make sure that we are keeping our coalition partners informed.

So some of them are direct service providers and they can share that information with the community.

We also share the information with community members and community organizations and on our social media to let people know today is when a hearing is happening.

It's really, so many things go on at the State House.

It's difficult to know what's happening when.

So we try to make sure that we're letting both the community and our partners know when is the hearing, when do you need to show up?

Here are some suggested talking points.

And whenever possible, we do try to ask people to share their experiences with us.

But we are paid to do this work.

It's really hard to get the average citizen to be willing to go down to the State House at five or 6:00 PM on a school night to give their testimony in person and wait their turn.

It can be a time consuming process.

And so we love educating people about that to help make it less intimidating and scary.

But at the end of the day, it is still a big ask, and so we try to be mindful of how much we're asking of the community, especially when we have to be also mindful of how we can give back to that community.

- Yeah.

Nevertheless, though, an engaged electorate, right, drives change.

Inflation has been a big headline nowadays.

We are coming up into a big election.

How do you think an engaged electorate can help drive economic change?

And what can you tell us about the inflation that's been happening in Rhode Island?

- Sorry for the face.

I mean.

- It's a loaded question.

- Hector mentioned earlier- - We can move on.

- About the shortage of affordable housing.

- Yeah.

- So I think we're seeing a huge shortage of affordable housing.

I don't know that that's just driven by inflation per se, but Providence did experience the highest rent increase in 2023 in the whole country.

So we have really high rent that people are struggling to afford.

The cost of groceries and out of pocket healthcare costs has really risen rapidly in the past few years.

And so we advocate for policies to try to address all of those things.

We're advocating for increasing the minimum wage because according to our reports and research, the Rhode Island Standard of Need is a report we put out every two years, more than half of Rhode Islanders are struggling to meet their basic needs like housing and food.

So we advocate for policies to make those things more affordable and also to increase the minimum wage because as of the time of our last report in 2022, a single person needed to earn more than $16 an hour to meet their basic needs.

And as you mentioned, we've experienced a lot of inflation since then.

Our next report will be coming out this month and I'd imagine that that number is going to be even higher for what it costs to meet your basic needs or what a Rhode Islander needs to earn to meet their basic needs.

So there are policy proposals to solve many of these programs, and that's why we need an informed electorate.

We need people asking the candidates running for state representative and state senator, do you support increasing the minimum wage?

Do you support increasing eligibility for the Childcare Assistance program?

And do you support a rent cap increase?

There is a policy both at the Providence City Council level and at the State House.

There are proposals to cap rent increases at 4% per year, so that we couldn't see that record high rent increase like we did in 2023.

And so those are the things that we try to make sure we can educate community members about so that they can ask candidates questions that are important for their lives.

- Yeah.

We only have a few minutes left, surprisingly, we've flown by.

What do you have going on in the future that you would want the community to know about?

- I think- - There's a lot.

- A lot.

- So much.

(group laughs) - Well, I think I would really encourage people to get in touch with the Equity Impact campaign.

There's a part about just legislation trying to get a law passed so that legislators are required to do that equity impact statement with every proposal.

And there's also the aspect of the state budget, where we're trying to get the governor to be required to provide an equity statement about the state budget.

And then the thing I'm most excited about, a proposal to institute a millionaire's tax in Rhode Island.

- Mm.

- It's super popular with voters.

We know that Rhode Island has a lot of needs, Rhode Islanders have a lot of needs.

This millionaire's tax proposal would only affect 2,100 tax filers.

It would only tax them on income over their first one million in earnings.

So it wouldn't touch that first million.

And it would all be directed towards investment in childcare, public education, road and bridges, which we know we've had some problems with bridges recently, and public transportation.

- Yeah.

- So really, that's all critical infrastructure that's gonna benefit all Rhode Islanders, including the millionaires who we're hoping to assess this tax on.

- Yeah, and lastly, I just want to maybe leave folks on a hopeful note on how they become more empowered or engaged when it comes to being intentional about how we lift our communities out of poverty.

What would you compel them to do?

Is it connect with the EPI?

Is it connect with your coalitions to become a little bit more engaged with the work that you're doing?

- I think there's lots of ways to advocate.

So I would encourage anybody to connect with us because we work with so many different coalitions.

I'm sure we could connect them with the one that's relevant to their interests.

We also offer Policy Advocacy 101 trainings.

So if you wanna learn how the General Assembly works, how you can make your voice heard, how to find who's representing you currently, we do offer trainings for that.

We do them even for one person.

So happy to do that.

We also have an election toolkit on our website.

So I would just encourage people to follow their passions and to know that they really can make a difference.

We listed a couple of the wins that we had this year, but there were really so many more.

And that's because there were coalitions full of people like you and I pushing legislators to make those changes.

So it's definitely possible, and I'd love to share some more of those wins with anybody who wants to reach out to the Economic Progress Institute.

- Is this why you do this work?

When you see change happen, is that what motivates you?

- I think it's a combination of wins, but you don't always win.

And I think that's important to keep in mind whenever you're an advocate of any kind.

You have to be mindful of the fact that you will have disappointments and you will experience defeat.

But I think it's more of the beauty of seeing communities come together to make that kind of change and that determination and grit that folks put on when they have to go and be brave enough to sit in front of their legislators and speak about something that's very personal to them.

That right there is something that makes you proud about your community and that makes you ever, that makes you want to wake up the next morning and keep going.

- Right, and honestly, sometimes the losses can be even more motivating.

You know, they can make you mad.

Injustice, I think, makes all of our team mad.

And so I think in a lot of ways people get into this work 'cause they see problems and they wanna solve them.

And I think at the Economic Progress Institute, we have a team full of passionate problem solvers.

- I love that.

You certainly are leading the way.

Thank you so much for the work that you do.

- Thank you for having us.

- Thank you for being here.

We have run out of time.

I would like to thank tonight's guest, Nina Harrison and Hector Perez-Aponte.

You can watch this episode and all our past episodes anytime at watch.ripbs.org.

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