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I’m Derecka Mehrens, the executive director of Working Partnerships USA. We rarely ask for your financial support, but this year we are — and I want to tell you why.

Over the last 12 months we’ve made huge strides in our core campaigns that tackle the root causes of inequality and poverty. We helped pass crucial bills in the state legislature that will protect renters from outrageous rent hikes and unfair evictions and ensure people working in the gig economy are not denied basic labor protections.

Meanwhile, our Silicon Valley Rising campaign saw some of the world’s largest tech giants pledge an enormous $4.5 billion for affordable housing in the region.

We’ve had a really good year — but we have to keep up the momentum.

As we approach 2020, we will have to work even harder to both drive forward the movement for a just economy and hold onto our recent wins. Big money is already working to protect their interests, fighting against the progress we’ve made and the future that our communities deserve. This is where you come in.

Today is #GivingTuesday, an international day of giving to encourage people to do good. Over the past few years, this idea has grown into a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to celebrate generosity. Can you chip in to help us grow our work for the next 12 months?

My colleagues at Working Partnerships USA fight hard every day for a future in which everybody has a safe and secure home, a high-quality job at a safe workplace, affordable health insurance, and a voice in our democracy.

With your help, we can make even more progress in 2020.

In solidarity,

Derecka Mehrens
Executive Director

Yesterday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a landmark renter protection bill into law. AB 1482, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, will protect millions of renters from the most egregious rent increases.

The newly enacted law will limit how much landlords can raise the rent each year and protect every renter in California from unfair evictions.

This is a huge win for renters, and especially those in cities where policymakers have refused to act to protect renters. This is now the strongest statewide rent cap in the country and we could not have done it without your support.

We’re also extremely grateful to the bill’s sponsors and our allies in helping this bill to become law and better protect the millions of renters in California. These include Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, PICO, TechEquity, Western Center, Public Advocates, and Policylink.

Along with AB 1482, the Governor also signed a number of critical bills that will help alleviate the housing crisis, including bills to stop housing discrimination (SB 329), address our housing needs with a regional approach (AB 1487), and make more public land available for affordable homes (AB 1486).

Not only will these bills provide basic protections, but they provide a rallying point for tenants across our region. In Silicon Valley, cities still need to do their part to protect their most vulnerable residents from unreasonable rent increases and to fill in the gaps of the state bill, and through organizing tenants and allies, we have a renewed opportunity to make this happen.

Yesterday, Governor Newsom signed the 2019-20 California State Budget. Beyond the big headline items, an initiative critical to working people, communities of color, and our climate future was included: $35 million for high road workforce training partnerships.

Working Partnerships and our state coalition the California Partnership for Working Families joined with a broad alliance of community, labor, environmental and equity organizations in advocating to fund High Road Training Partnerships and Construction Careers.

The High Road Training Partnerships (HRTPs) aim to ensure our most vulnerable populations have access to quality jobs that support families and communities — and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As California works to transform to a clean, carbon-neutral economy, the new funding will support regional partnerships between labor, community, and employers to prepare under-represented community members for careers in the State’s growing industries: jobs and skills that will be essential to enable those industries to transform to meet the State’s climate goals.

Our Trades Orientation Program is built on the High-Road Construction Careers (HRCC) model: building a coordinated pipeline for members of disadvantaged communities into high-skilled careers. That pipeline has successfully recruited, prepared, trained and placed over 125 local community members into skilled trades apprenticeships, with over half the participants coming out of homelessness or housing programs to become part of the future energy efficiency and green building workforce.

One of those participants, Bobby, is a 20-year old, former foster youth who joined the Trades Orientation Program to try to find a career and a direction. After the program, he became an apprentice and was hired by a drywall contractor onto a County building project, receiving on-the-job training to install new types of drywall materials engineered to increase building performance and energy efficiency. Bobby did not have a car, but through working with the program’s coaches, he was able to meet up at the shop and share rides with coworkers to get to his job. Bobby says he loves working in drywall, his coworkers treat him like family, and the apprenticeship is everything and more than he expected.

Bobby’s story illustrates the path for California to follow to reach our ambitious climate goals: a path that puts the participation of all Californians in the new economy front and center. The State’s new budget leads us along that path by enabling the HRCC and HRTP models to ramp up via local partnerships throughout the state, building a framework to ensure California grows our own highly skilled, climate-ready local workforce in every region.

Building a workable low-carbon economy will require the concerted efforts of millions of workers over many decades. If California is to make a successful transition to that green, sustainable future, workers’ voices must be central to that conversation.

This morning, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made a big announcement. After our two years of organizing and dozens of town halls, reports, actions, and marches, Google said it plans to invest $1 billion for housing across the Bay Area.

This is a big win that shifts the norms around tech’s responsibility. The tech giant is listening to the thousands of community members and tech service workers who have organized to demand tech corporations address their impacts on our community. Google is recognizing its role in our housing crisis and that it must help solve it.

Today’s win shows that when we stand up together — when we go all in for all of us — we can inspire a new standard for tech development. Thank you to everyone who has stepped up in the past two years, this would not have happened without you.

We know there’s much more Google and the City of San José must do to develop without displacement. Our research shows that Google needs to create over 5,000 affordable homes in San José alone, so it needs to take additional steps both regionally and in San José. We will keep organizing to make sure Google focuses on those most in need, fully addresses its impacts, and takes public and community input into account.

From the start, this campaign has been about setting a new direction for tech growth, one that creates widespread opportunity instead of more rent hikes, overcrowding, homelessness, and super-commutes. We’re far from done — and we’ll need you to keep stepping up in the weeks and months to come — but Google’s acknowledgement that it has a responsibility to do better is a major step forward.

Together, we can make sure that no matter what we look like or how we make a living, we all have the freedom to stay and thrive in our communities.

This morning, we released new research that reveals Google needs to help create more than 5,000 new affordable homes to ensure local families in our region aren’t hit with rent increases they simply cannot afford as a result of the tech giant’s new San Jose mega-campus.

Families in San Jose should be able to feel secure in their homes and communities — but many would not be able to find the extra money to afford the rent hikes caused by Google’s new  campus.

For our new report, we worked with research firm Beacon Economics to model the impact that the new mega-campus, and the influx of the expected 20,000 new tech employees and 8,000 new service workers, would have on housing costs in our region — and the findings are troubling.

In short, unless more than 5,000 new affordable homes — and more 12,000 market-rate homes — are built, the cost of bringing Google to San Jose will be enormous. It’s a price that will be paid by local residents, particularly our community’s poorest families.

Even more troubling, the research found that these rent increases would be even more harmful to communities of color. By the time Google builds its campus, renters will see their rent take up even more of their paycheck with Latinx, Asian and African-American families paying a far higher share of their income than white residents.

This is why it’s so important that Google creates enough homes, at all levels of affordability, to prevent this. All residents, whether black, white or brown, deserve to feel secure in their communities and plan a future within them.

The good news is, another future is possible. In this report, we spell out an agenda for how Google can take responsibility and partner with the City of San Jose and our communities to prevent further displacement by building more affordable housing, supporting tenants facing eviction and giving workers a voice on the job and the freedom to negotiate better working conditions.

Thanks to the input of over 1,700 residents across the city, we’ve laid out a plan to ensure Google lifts up the community rather than pulling it apart.

Google and the City of San Jose can set a new standard for tech development that avoids dramatic increases in rent, displacement, and homelessness, while creating new opportunities for local residents. We have the plan, now we just need Google to take action.