Editor’s note: The following excerpt is taken from the Overview section of the Public Policy Priorities (PPP) document. The full PPP is available for the public here. 

For the first three years of her life, Sharvonne A. Walker and her family lived in a shelter. Her mother worked as a carpenter and educator, but her income was too low to afford rent until they finally got housing assistance. Sharvonne’s mother and brother suffered serious health problems, but help from Social Security, health coverage and nutrition assistance got them through very difficult times. 

Sharvonne got an education and works for an organization that provides help to other families. She shared her story in CHN’s blog, Voices for Human Needs. She writes “If we help families survive rocky times rather than fall deeper into poverty, all of us benefit as a society. If we don’t, then millions of stories like mine won’t be possible.”

It is the mission of the Coalition on Human Needs to seek federal investments to ensure that families like Sharvonne’s can get the help they need. Helping people to get through health crises, to secure a place to live and enough to eat means family members can get an education and improve their work and life options. When that happens, Sharvonne is right: all of us benefit.

Every two years, the Coalition on Human Needs enlists expert staff from its member organizations to update its Public Policy Priorities, assembling a comprehensive set of policies aimed at ensuring that people can meet their basic needs and move forward as they choose. These goals have deep roots; they are at least as old as the call for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The farther away we are from achieving these goals, the farther we are from achieving the ideals of democracy.

These foundational goals cannot be met without access to medical care, care for family members, nutritious food, housing, mobility, education, modern communications, and safety from disaster.  Many people can meet these needs through earnings, but for millions of Americans, paying for what they need is growing painfully harder. Nearly one in four renter households is paying half or more of their income on rent. Surveyed in August-September, 2024, fully 37 percent said they had difficulty paying for their usual household expenses in the past 7 days, and 12 percent said their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past week.

People with the lowest incomes suffer the deepest hardships, unsurprisingly. Among households with income below $25,000, more than 30 percent sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the previous week; for households with $75,000 – under $100,000, 7 percent were going without enough food. Black, brown and indigenous people are disproportionately poor, with racial/ethnic disparities magnified for children. Poverty for American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic children is well over double the rate for White children; between one in five and one in four children of color are living in poverty.

Reducing poverty and hardship requires federal investments that keep pace with our people’s varied needs, and so these Public Policy Priorities detail a wide range of effective programs that require support: health care, food assistance, job training and education, affordable housing, child care and care services for older adults and people with disabilities, treatment for substance use and mental health disorders, and more. There is also support for protections against human-made and natural disasters, which very disproportionately victimize people with low incomes and people of color.

But while a broad range of practical policy solutions are detailed in these pages, CHN recognizes that the nation can only make progress towards its essential goals if its budget and tax decisions are rooted in equity and responsive to need. It is not by chance that so many Americans are poor or near poor, with disproportionate hardship by race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Allocation of federal resources, through spending or tax decisions, very disproportionately benefits people and corporations with wealth and power. CHN chooses budget and tax policy-making as its “leadership” issues because the decisions made here will drive whether the government will be responsive to need or to entrenched power seeking even more advantage.

In mapping the Coalition on Human Needs’ priorities for 2025-2026, we know well that many of those with extreme individual and corporate wealth want to prolong and expand their tax advantages at the cost of more than $5 trillion over a decade. Powerful interests want to pay for those breaks by massive reductions in human needs spending. They want to use federal budget mechanisms to force cuts and rigid restructuring of health care, nutrition, education, and environmental protections. They would assert far greater executive branch power in tandem with restrictive budget measures. They would reject major investments in affordable housing and family-sustaining care. They would dismantle consumer and labor protections to protect corporate power and wealth. 

CHN recognizes that today’s oligarchs are short-sighted in seeking to starve investments that enable tens of millions of Americans to avoid hardship and advance their own goals. Both short- and long-term growth require us to invest in our people. But adding trillions of dollars to already entrenched wealth is a powerful incentive. Human needs advocates must use every tool at hand to reject more tax breaks and to prevent budget choices that would strangle our nation’s capacity to respond to need. 

That means opposing efforts to impose rigid restrictions such as block grants or caps on basic needs programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or schemes to privatize Social Security or Medicare. It means opposing bills that pay for tax breaks for the rich with massive cuts to human needs programs. It means fighting back against efforts to slash programs and protections for low-income people as the condition for raising the debt limit. 

The policy positions in this document are focused on investing in the resources people need to thrive. That includes protecting and building upon requirements for federal agencies to follow the law to protect consumers, workers, students, and tenants. It also includes a federal workforce that administers programs fairly and efficiently and enforces voting rights and accurate collection of census data to ensure fair redistricting and allocation of federal funds where the need is greatest. CHN will work to support budget and tax decisions that provide justice for immigrants and will oppose squandering federal resources on anti-immigrant enforcement measures that threaten our democracy. CHN will also oppose wastefully excessive payments to military or other government contractors.

These Public Policy Priorities recognize that people unable to earn a living wage, to have affordable access to modern communications, and to secure their basic needs are far less able to exercise their rights. These constraints are the goal of oligarchy, and are anathema to democracy.