Inland Empire, CA – The California Economic Summit announced the launch today of its new 2019 Roadmap to Shared Prosperity, an updated plan for the state and California’s regions to work together to combat rising income inequality, growing economic insecurity, and declining upward mobility.
The challenge is clear: Rising income inequality, a growing sense of economic insecurity, and a dramatic decline in upward mobility—are at the heart of the existential crisis facing California today: While millions of people in this state are prospering, millions more do not have a clear path to the California Dream.
California’s economy continues to be among the world’s most productive, but the public, private, and civic sector leaders working through the Summit recognize that this unprecedented engine of growth, which has attracted people eager to live the “California Dream” for generations, is not working for far too many people.
It’s not just that one in five Californians — 7.4 million people—are living in poverty. It’s not just that the high cost of living is making it difficult for millions more to make ends meet—with fully half of California households now struggling to rent or buy a home in their community. It’s not just that a changing climate is threatening more communities with more frequent—and more extreme—natural disasters, or that the wealthiest 5 percent of Californians are earning almost as much as the next 60 percent.
The 2019 Roadmap to Shared Prosperity outlines the California Economic Summit’s plans to address these challenges through a comprehensive agenda:
- An updated strategy to Elevate CA that invests in early childhood education and builds a smarter safety net to help millions of California move out of poverty
- The Summit’s One Million Challenges — targeted initiatives to expand the state’s skilled workforce, lower housing costs, create more livable wage jobs, and invest in sustainable water infrastructure
- Cross-cutting initiatives for encouraging rural economic development, promoting resiliency in regions recovering from wildfires, and helping more communities tap the potential of new federally-designated Opportunity Zones
- The “CA Dream Index,” a new scorecard the administration can use to track progress on all of these fronts
This year’s Roadmap, based on the input of more than 500 participants at the 2018 Summit in Santa Rosa, combines the best thinking and strategies from across the state for bringing about change that can make the CA Dream a reality for more Californians.
