Read what we were up to in 2023
Dear Friends~
2023 was a big year for us here at Good Jobs First — in July, we turned 25!
25!
We marked the big occasion by celebrating the times we’ve helped communities secure better economic development. In case you missed our videos and timeline, check them out on our YouTube channel.
We celebrated in Louisiana, where grassroots groups help reform a terrible program that gave oil and gas companies nearly bottomless property tax breaks. The new governor has promised to maintain the reforms. We’ll be watching.
We helped public education-protection fights in Kansas City, Missouri; New York State; Cincinnati; Philadelphia; and St. Louis — and trained many others how to use powerful new disclosure data to track what school districts lose to tax breaks.
We continued to help journalists every day make sense of deals they’re reporting on, and gave rapid-response TA to grassroots groups new to subsidies like tax increment financing, industrial revenue bonds and all the other ways companies dodge taxes at the expense of working families and small businesses.
We added nearly 125,000 new records to our Subsidy Tracker and Violation Tracker databases, used heavily by campaigners, policymakers, journalists, academics, and others tracking tax breaks and corporate misconduct.
I couldn’t have imagined 25 years ago how far we’d come. But we’ll never rest on our laurels.
Truth is, our work is accelerating: as our databases keep improving, our disclosure victories pay off, our research tools, FAQs, research precedents and media profile keep rising, we help more people and make a bigger impact every week.
Read just some of what we did last year.
With your support, we will keep our pedal to the metal!
Let’s make sure this economy works for all of us. Together, we can.
In Solidarity,
Greg LeRoy