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This week, Texas Impact staff made presentations in Dallas and Austin—and while the topics were different, the main question seems to be the same everywhere: Does our advocacy matter? The answer is yes.
If you’re feeling like your advocacy for specific policies is not resulting in measurable progress, or if your particular legislators seem deaf to your communications, you definitely aren’t alone and you aren’t necessarily wrong—but that doesn’t mean advocacy isn’t effective. Advocacy happens in a civic ecosystem that includes a lot of other moving parts, and many of those other parts are in urgent need of maintenance and repair.
But while we work on fixing what is broken in our democracy, the legislative calendar marches on. Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows has given House members a February 9 deadline to submit interim charge suggestions. The Sunset review of the entire state health and human services system is underway. And soon, agencies will receive instructions for preparing their budget requests for the 2028-2029 biennium. Our friends over at Texas 2036 have a great post on this very topic, if you need additional convincing.
In the blog this week, Becca explains how the new carbon regulations in other parts of the world will impact Texas and the U.S., and our policy fellow Sydney has a deep dive into maternal health and health disparities. And Rebecca has your 1-2-3 checklist for voting in the March primaries—which could be your most important vote of the year, depending on where you live.
We’re counting down to the United Women in Faith Texas Legislative Event coming up January 25-27. In-person registration for Legislative Event is sold out, but you can still sign up to attend virtually. As is our custom, we’ll be rolling out a lot of new programming and resources at Legislative Event—even if you don’t attend the event, you’ll be able to get all the new content soon, including Sunday school studies, toolkits, policy briefs, and more. A couple of teasers:
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