Archives West Finding Aid

The Alternatives for Washington (AFW) program began in 1974 and concluded with a final report in early 1977. AFW involved Washington citizens in community-based social planning; it was funded with grants from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Pacific Northwest Regional Commission in the US Department of Commerce, and administered by the state's Office of Program Planning and Fiscal Management.

Governor Daniel J. Evans launched the AFW program in January 1974 with the mission first to ask Washington citizens what they wanted the state to be like in 1985 and then to involve them in actualizing that vision by identifying the costs and necessary trade-offs. Workshops, seminars, and community meetings across the state inaugurated the program and reached 60,000 citizens in the first year. In 1975 the 150-person statewide AFW task force analyzed and evaluated responses and compiled a report that identified eight public policy areas for Phase Two. Phase Two returned with costs attached to proposals and queried citizens to identify acceptable trade-offs to preserve "our magnificent Northwest life-style" (Alternatives for Washington, Vol. I, Rpt. 1, May 1975). Claiming to have involved 100,000 people over its three years, AFW concluded in January 1977 with the issuance of a final report An Agenda for the Future: A Citizens Report on Alternatives for Washington.

Several departments at Washington State University assisted with conducting meetings, collecting and analyzing responses to opinion polls, and producing media presentations. These included Cooperative Extension, whose relevant records are contained in Archives 225, along with the Department of Rural Sociology (especially faculty members John M. Wardwell and Don A. Dillman), the Social Research Center, and Radio-Television Services. Besides this collection, WSU-held media associated with the project include photographs and a 16-mm film in Archives 225 (see below) and two 3/4-inch videotapes entitled "Alternatives for Washington: A Future Tense" in WSU Libraries Media Materials Services that are an "enhanced" slide show on the background and purpose of AFW with photographs from public meetings. Note that Archives 225 contains slides that may be the originals used in this slide show.

The films in this collection are assumed to be footage shot by WSU Radio-Television Services that was then used to create three AFW-associated films identified in WorldCat as WSU-produced and held only by the Washington State Library: Alternatives for Washington [1974?], Issaquah, a Beginning: Alternatives for Washington [1974?], and The First Year: Alternatives for Washington [1975?].

Alternatives for Washington was a 12-minute introduction to the AFW project; Issaquah, a Beginning: Alternatives for Washington documented 1974's twelve-day citizen panels and public meetings in Issaquah and was released in 27-minute and 20-minute "short" versions; and the 26-minute The First Year: Alternatives for Washington summarized the Phase I results including the areas of concern based on the 1974 citizen surveys and is included in Archives 225.

This collection's films were stored at Teknifilm, Inc. in Portland and sent to WSU Libraries in 2001 after Oregon Historical Society acquired the company's collection. Teknifilm offered complete film processing from 1964 to 1998. WSU Radio-Television Services presumably sent film footage shot for AFW to Teknifilm to be developed and perhaps for post-production work. This collection seems to consist of what remained at Teknifilm: footage used in a WSU-production, but not the final prints.