Getting period products in schools, strengthening child sexual abuse prevention and expanding the child tax credit. Those are just some of The Policy Project’s accomplishments over the past few years.
Now they want to share what they’ve learned about passing policy in Utah.
“It's so easy to get in the frame of, like, ‘This is what's wrong and I can't stand this, and the Legislature did this on purpose and they hate us,’ or something like that,” said founder and president Emily Bell McCormick. “And I think we always try to go with, ‘Hey, hey, you might not have noticed, but this is a problem, let us help you solve it.’”
The group’s results speak for themselves, with an impressive track record of legislation and budget appropriation requests that were pushed across the finish line, due in no small part to McCormick and The Policy Project’s efforts.
So, The Policy Project held an inaugural Policy Pitch Competition on June 12, where it heard detailed proposals from 115 Utahns on everything from housing to pay transparency, with three finalists presenting to a panel of state lawmakers and policy experts.
McCormick said the real value of the competition is stress testing these ideas in front of people who could actually make some of these proposals happen.
“I think we all are tempted to stay in echo chambers because they're nice and cozy and warm,” she said. ”The reality is, unless you're testing this idea with a lot of people and getting broad support, it's hard to make it work.”
One key to success is keeping things local.
“Our best ideas have come from people who are living in Utah,” McCormick said. “They're everyday Utahns, they're going to work, they're coming home, they're raising a kid, they're grandparents, whatever, and they often can see there's this weird flaw in the system that's making my life a little bit more difficult, and we can kind of craft a solution around that.”
This local, solutions-based approach resonates with lawmakers, too.
Republican Rep. Tracy Miller agrees that the best legislation she sees each session comes directly from Utahns themselves, not from special interests or lobbyists.
“A lot of our policy is coming from other states,” she said. “Legislators will go to conferences and go, ‘Oh, look what they did there, let's do that here.’ And while there may be some merit to that policy, the best policy is when it's, I think, Utah-focused.”
For Democratic Rep. Verona Mauga, it’s also not enough to just have numbers and statistics on your side. Telling an effective story is just as important.
“We can get all the studies and all the data and all the reports right, and we can do the math and make sense of things in that way, but the human aspect is so important,” she said. “I think one thing we forget to do is we get so mathematical in things that we stop humanizing each other.”
Mauga said the competition’s format is invaluable because it’s important to listen to communities.
“Many of these ideas are so good and well thought out,” she said. “I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of these conversations that we're having in a space like this move to the actual Legislature.”
This year’s Policy Pitch Competition winner was Utah State University graduate student Melanie Webster for her proposal to reform the state’s criminal debt collection system. She took home a $10,000 prize. The win does not mean The Policy Project will champion her proposal next legislative session, but it could inform their future work.
And McCormick said the competition is about more than just generating policy ideas — it’s about encouraging people to become active participants in solving community problems.
“How do we get people to shift from thinking about, ‘Gosh, this is what's wrong in society?’ to, ‘Gosh, I can do something about this.’”
