Our Work
Money In People’s Pockets. Baseline makes it dramatically easier for working people to claim the money and public resources available to them.
Financial Stability. Baseline helps people turn short-term income gains into greater security, choice, and opportunity.
Community Power. Baseline strengthens the leadership and civic infrastructure through which working people shape decisions that affect their lives. We help create the public will to change policy, systems, and public narrative to raise incomes and expand opportunity.
Our Approach
The current baseline is too low. It asks people to work harder simply to fall further behind. It manages hardship through fragmented programs instead of ensuring that people have the income and opportunity they need. And it reinforces the idea that financial struggle is an individual problem rather than a shared challenge shaped by wages, costs, public policy, and access to opportunity.
Baseline begins with a different premise: working people know what they need to get by and get ahead. When people have more income, savings, stability, and voice, they can transform their lives—and stronger families create stronger communities.
News & Updates
The Bottom Line
Voters Demanded a More Affordable Life. Here’s Where We Start.
Baseline will organize with community partners and working Californians to press for those changes. The people who spend hours applying for help, lose benefits after a raise, or risk their jobs over a car repair know where the system breaks. Their experience must shape how we fix it.
The Bottom Line
It's Time to Raise the Baseline
Our new name is a commitment to a higher starting point for everyone—and to the work it will take to get there. Californians are doing their part. It’s time our policies did theirs. It’s time to raise the baseline.
News
Baseline Invests $75,000 in Grants for Bay Area Organizations Expanding Economic Opportunities for Low-Income Families
Baseline, formerly known as Golden State Opportunity, announced that it has invested $75,000 in grants for partner organizations in the Bay Area for the 2027 tax season.
The Bottom Line
CalEITC and Tax Credits work, but the Baseline Is Still Too Low.
This is how California’s tax credits get built and get stronger. Working people show up and share their reality, and lawmakers listen.
About
At Baseline, we believe in people. When people have economic stability and opportunity, they can make choices, pursue their goals, care for their families, and contribute to their communities.
In 2026, Baseline changed its name from Golden State Opportunity. Our experience with refundable tax credits proved that practical, scalable solutions can materially improve people’s lives. But it also showed that access alone is not enough. Programs work only when people know about them, can navigate them, and have trusted help. Benefits endure only when policy protects and expands them. And larger change becomes possible only when the people affected have the organization, relationships, narrative, and political power to shape decisions.
The next phase of our work focuses on four forms of impact: immediate income, lasting financial stability, organized community power, and policy and systems change. Each reinforces the others.
Together, they create a pathway from relief to agency—and from individual opportunity to a stronger economic baseline for all.
Ways to Get Involved
