Voices: In 2025, Utah’s policy will focus more on preventing societal challenges

This is part of a series of forward-looking predictions for 2025. Read more.

In the year ahead, I envision leveraging our state’s collective resources — our pooled tax revenues, along with our time and energy — to focus more on preventing societal challenges. By prioritizing solutions with the greatest potential to benefit our communities, we can ensure our resources are used for the widest and most meaningful impact.

Such a future is, of course, entirely dependent on the thinking and actions of this great state’s citizens and elected officials.

Utah has an incredibly sturdy foundation. A strong economy, lower-than-U.S.-average child-poverty rates, unmatched outdoor recreation, family-friendly culture, high educational attainment and strong faith communities.

We also have child sexual abuse rates that are near double the national average, we have tens of thousands of families who live in poverty, we have social media use that is hurting our kids, we have pockets of poverty that are growing and a lack of affordable housing.

Generally such issues are not unique to Utah, but because of our foundational strength, Utah is well-positioned to be even better than we are by focusing on prevention. And to show other states a pathway to solve for them.

In a world where our reality is not “either/or,” rather it is “and” — (e.g. our economy is world class and our poverty rates are too high) — it becomes incredibly clear that we need to reprioritize the way we use our collective state funds to work toward the prevention of society’s biggest issues — and a general determination and stubbornness to get it done.

Our non-profit, The Policy Project, has worked specifically on prevention and opportunity-building initiatives. We established that having a period (menstruating) for forty years in a life span is indeed a normal occurrence for half of the population; that students who have their basic needs met are more likely to succeed on their journey to becoming productive members of our communities; and that when kids know more about sexual abuse, they are less likely to experience it.

We have worked with the Utah Legislature and introduced norm-changing policies for each of these issues in an effort to provide opportunities for everyone, with a specific focus on those experiencing the most need.

And each of these policies passed the Utah Legislature unanimously.

But what’s more remarkable, is that these efforts are designed to go upstream of Utah’s big issues and to help our state prioritize things that will make a concrete difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands.

To see what these changes look like, in November, my team and I filled my well-used Suburban with period products and winter kits to distribute at teen resource centers in Sevier, Piute and Washington Counties. These Teen Centers were part of a policy initiative we worked on just two years ago — and they are now attached to 86 schools around the state to help our most vulnerable youth.

We met a young man, Leo, in Richfield, who told us that despite his mother moving to Texas, and his father becoming incarcerated, he was able to attend school in part because of the resources at the Teen Center. He now attends Snow College.

We heard stories of girls using period products to stay in class. Of kids understanding and identifying abuse, and knowing how to report it. And of more “Leos” having some of the things they need to get on their feet because of Teen Centers.

Sometimes prevention means a tampon. Sometimes prevention means converting a classroom into a Teen Center. And sometimes it’s as simple as 30 minutes of education on a tough topic to save a student from the horrors of abuse.

This year, our work will be directed to our students who are anxious — because they are trying to balance the constant demands from their phones — by ensuring that all schools in Utah limit cell phone use in the classroom.

We’ll also work to ensure our students don’t go hungry — that kids living in poverty have food during the school year, and during the summer. Nourished bodies lead to nourished minds.

When we as a people collectively see a society-wide problem, when we understand that there is something wrong — that people are suffering — we do something about it.

Let 2025 be the year we harness our state’s resources, along with our own time and energy, to tackle major challenges with proactive, large-scale solutions.

Emily Bell McCormick is founder of The Policy Project— a non-profit that creates movements in order to forward healthy, long-term policy at state level.

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