Gavin Thornton: Hawaiʻi Appleseed co-director helps the poor, aims to untangle the state budget process

Shortly after graduating from the University of Virginia’s law school in 2002, while working as an attorney in Legal Aid Society of Hawaiʻi’s Kona office, Gavin Thornton discovered that the state had been overcharging public housing tenants for more than a decade. The dispute became Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice’s first case, with $2.3 million recovered on behalf of the renters.

These days, Thornton serves as a co-director of the Honolulu-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of low-income individuals, families and communities. It endeavors to pinpoint underlying community problems by conducting research on housing, health, education, immigration and disability rights issues.

Among current efforts Thornton’s excited about: plans in the works to launch Appleseed’s “Hawaiʻi Budget & Policy Center,” which will conduct research and data analysis on our state budget and tax structure, providing findings to policy makers ever in need of reliable information to more efficiently and effectively address poverty and inequality matters, he said.

“Good data and analysis underlies successful companies we’re all familiar with. That concept can be applied to governance, and the new budget center aims to dramatically increase Hawaiʻi’s capacity for data analysis focused on creating better public policy,” Thornton said.

In tandem with its Hawaiʻi Budget & Policy Center, which is slated to be up and running in 2018, Appleseed intends to release a budget primer. “It will look at the process used to create the budget—where the state gets its money, how it spends it, how we compare to other states, and how things have changed over time,” Thornton said.