The following is a speech from the Economic Opportunity Institute’s Executive Director, Rian Watt, given at the 2025 Changemakers Dinner on Thursday, May 8, 2025. Changemakers brings together community from every corner of our state to celebrate our shared wins, chart a path forward, and support the transformative policy work of EOI.

Where we’ve been

For those of you who I haven’t met yet, my name is Rian Watt. I joined EOI as Executive Director just a little over a year ago after spending the first part of my career working to end homelessness, first here in the US, and then around the world. I want to talk a little bit about that work before I talk about EOI, because that work informs why I’m standing here tonight. 

I started my career in homelessness as a policy researcher on federal contracts, looking into why so many families were falling into homelessness, and what it would take to stop it. Later, I was part of the team that helped launch Los Angeles’ unified homelessness response system. And for the four years immediately before I joined EOI, I worked with local communities across five countries — Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, and the UK — helping them to set and reach a goal that at times felt impossible: zero homelessness.

During the time I led that work, seven communities in those five countries reached zero. Others are now close.

I am so proud of what we built there. In those years I spent working to end homelessness, I came to know many, many people experiencing it. And in every country I met them, when I asked people experiencing homelessness to tell me about their lives, I heard a version of the same story: A slow erosion of stability over time, and then a sudden crisis that resulted in the total collapse of their lives.

The stories of these incredible individual lives sounded similar, despite the oceans between them, because they were all the product of the same design: An economic system built to protect the privileged and punish the poor — one that makes it too easy to fall, and far too hard to rise. Put in simpler terms, these were all stories about a fundamental unfairness in our society.

The persistence of homelessness in our society demonstrates that unfairness clearly and viscerally, but all of you in this room know that it’s not the only example. That same basic unfairness is in our healthcare system, where one emergency can wipe out a family’s entire savings. It’s in our child care system, where families pay more than they can afford, and workers earn less than they deserve. And it’s in our tax code, where Washington’s wealthiest pay the lowest share of their income in taxes, and working people pay the highest.

That unfairness — its stubborn, evil persistence in a state that prides itself on its progressive reputation — is what brought me to EOI. I knew I needed to be here to tackle it.

Where we’re going

Twenty-seven years ago, John Burbank founded EOI because he saw that unfairness too. In the three decades since, EOI has delivered increases in Washington’s minimum wage, helped create some of the strongest overtime rules in the country, and ensured working people have access to Paid Family and Medical Leave to care for themselves and their loved ones through all the uncertainties of life. 

In 2025, the policies we work on have changed, but the values they’re based on haven’t: We are still working to build an economy rooted in fairness, care, and opportunity. We don’t want to just study problems — we want to equip the public, and the people in power, with the policy tools they need to solve them. 

This year, we set and pushed for a bold legislative agenda:

• A wealth tax on the ultra-rich, to fund schools, healthcare, and basic needs. 
• Stronger worker protections in our nation’s landmark Paid Family and Medical Leave Act — because no one should have to choose between caring for a loved one and keeping a job.
• And launching the Washington Future Fund, because opportunity shouldn’t depend on your ZIP code or the balance in your parents’ bank account.

I wish I could tell you that we were successful in getting all these policies passed. But we weren’t. And let’s be honest about why: We are up against enormously powerful forces.

Here in Washington, corporate lobbyists are getting better and better at killing progressive revenue in backroom deals. And nationally, we’re watching state capacity hollowed out, from the White House on down,  as oligarchs rewrite the rules to line their pockets. This isn’t just a policy fight. It’s a power struggle.

When billionaires hoard power, the public loses it. And when the public loses power, our collective future shrinks — unless we do something about it.

And we will. The people I knew then and know now who experienced the calamity of homelessness didn’t give up, even when the deck was stacked against them. They got up, they fought back, and they still hoped for a future for themselves. I see that same fight in the room with us tonight. This was a tough legislative session. We won some things worth fighting for — job protections for people using Paid Family and Medical Leave and lowered health care costs for public workers and teachers — but we also ended up with a budget that falls far short of our values.

How we get there

Picking up that fight again next legislative session and beyond will require us to draw upon a discipline of hope. It will also require us to remember why we do this work in the first place. Times of moral decline and moral uncertainty — times like the ones we’re living through now — in addition to challenging us, give us the opportunity to reaffirm our values. So I hope tonight, everyone in this room will take this moment to recommit: to building an economy rooted in fairness, care, and opportunity — not just for some, but for all. 

I hope you will recommit to a spirit of solidarity, to a spirit of unity, and to a spirit of hope. We are up against enormous forces, yes, but the scale of the challenge we face only means that our victory will be all the more sweet when we win. 

Thank you for being here tonight, and thank you for your support of EOI. I’m glad to be here with you.