California Calls Action Fund

Background

In November 2004, the California Alliance (rebranded as “California Calls” in 2011) was founded by its current president Anthony Thigpenn, a Los Angeles progressive activist as a project of SCOPE (Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education; formerly known as AGENDA, or Action for Grassroots Empowerment and Neighborhood Development Alternatives). At this point, nearly a decade before the founding of the California Calls Education Fund, the California Calls Action fund was registered as a 501(c)(4) political advocacy group. ¹²

One of California Calls’ first actions was the publication of a report, “The History of Tax and Fiscal Policy,” which discusses the history of legislative and political campaigns attempting to institute various statewide taxes in California since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. In the report, California Calls assessed Proposition 13 negatively, since it substantially decreased California property taxes and instituted a requirement of a two-thirds majority from both the lower and upper houses of the California legislature for increases of any state taxes. ³

Advocacy

In 2011, the California Calls Action Fund advocated for Proposition 25, an amendment to the California Constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority in the California state legislature for budgets to be enacted. Furthermore, the proposition requires state legislators in both houses of the legislature to forfeit their salaries in years when a budget is not passed. ⁴⁵ In 2012, the organization advocated in support of Proposition 30, a ballot measure that over a period of seven years increased personal income taxes for Californians earning more than $250,000 annually. Additionally, the measure increased the California sales tax by a quarter of a percent over a period of four years. ⁴⁶