In 2014, George Washington University Law Professor Spencer Overton assumed the position of interim president at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. At that time, “interim” was the operative word. Six years ago, prospects for the venerable Black institution were iffy. The Joint Center, which had lost its longtime president a decade earlier, was facing both financial and organizational challenges, Overton says. There were questions about whether the Joint Center even had a future.
But Overton, who had served as a senior official in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, discovered that the legacy of previous leaders was worth keeping. Nearly seven years into his tenure, he’s now committed to devoting the rest of his professional life to the nonprofit known as “America’s Black think tank.”
The Joint Center began in 1970, in part to help the thousands of black officials who were elected after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The late Eddie Williams, named president in 1972, was a driving force in building what the New York Times termed the Joint Center’s reputation as “an unrivaled source of research in the state of black America.”
Williams, a former journalist, Capitol Hill staffer, State Department official and university vice president, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship in 1988. He helmed the Joint Center until his retirement in 2004.
It’s not unusual for nonprofits to struggle to find their way after one person who has left such an imprint on an organization steps aside, Overton observes. But by 2013, the center faced lagging contributions, and its issue portfolio had grown diffuse. “Like many public interest organizations, the Joint Center had lost a lot of momentum, in terms of its purpose and its focus,” Overton said. “Significant improvements needed to be made.”
Nevertheless, Overton stressed that the Joint Center had enormous value. “The work that the people who came before us had done was so significant in creating a brand” that tackling all these challenges “to restore the organization” was worth the effort.
When Overton arrived in 2014, his first goal was to “really address” the organizational and financial challenges. That was his focus for the first two years of his tenure. The center then received a grant from the Ford Foundation to do a strategic plan, he says. After that plan was developed, “we started to grow.”
Not that it’s been easy. Overton cut costs and took only a partial salary or no salary to right the ship. He doesn’t intend to pay himself a full salary until 2022. And he’s focusing on a limited number of issues that have been “under-explored by other organizations, but are incredibly critical to black communities.” Those issues have included congressional staff diversity, the future of work, tech policy and certain economic issues. “We’ve tried to do very high-quality work,” he adds. That has meant focusing only on those issues the Joint Center has the capacity to tackle. “If we tried to do too much, the quality could suffer,” he conceded.
Overton says the organization now is “stable,” and has an annual budget of $1.7 million, about half the budget it had in its “heyday.” But he expects the nonprofit to grow in the near future, with an annual budget of $3 million to $3.5 million. “There’s no reason in the next few years that we shouldn’t be at $10 million,” he adds. Foundations, including “Annie E. Casey, Marguerite Casey, Hewlett and the Democracy Fund” have supported these efforts, he adds. Two new board members hold senior positions at the MacArthur Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Joint Center also likely benefits from the general trend that foundations in the Black Lives Matter era are more sensitive to the societal problem of systemic racism and more willing to support Black-led nonprofits than they had been in the past.
Four years ago, the Joint Center did groundbreaking research documenting that few people of color held senior staff positions in Congress. By 2020, the Joint Center noted some improvement, but insufficient racial diversity persisted. Its Senate study, for example, found that people of color represented only 11% of the senior Senate workforce, while constituting 40% of the population. African-American staffers held only 3.1% of senior positions in the personal offices of Senators while comprising more than 13% of the U.S. population. Not only should Black members of Congress hire senior staff who are Black, so should scores of policymakers who represent a state or district with a large Black population, Overton says.
But the lack of diversity is far broader, Overton says. Progressive think tanks and advocacy groups often lack Black policy analysts, he says, noting that “only 3% of economists are Black.” While acknowledging that many progressive groups have been exploring the impacts of systemic racism on African-Americans, Overton says that it’s still crucial that Black experts “be at the table.”
“I do think that funders at a certain point were focused on socio-economic issues,” and felt that as long as they supported advocacy and “movement” groups, “there wasn’t a need for a Black think tank,” Overton says. Funders believed that the “policy solutions” were there; they just had to be implemented.
But Overton argues that Black communities and experts must have a role in devising those solutions. “It’s important to center Black communities in terms of how we look at problems,” he says. “So, when we think about the Paycheck Protection Program and loans to small businesses, we can understand” how a program’s structure “might exclude small Black businesses,” and ensure that systems “work for everyone.”
And times and circumstances change, he adds. “It’s wonderful to have a Black president,” but his tenure doesn’t last forever, and even reform laws such as the Voting Rights Act can be weakened by the courts or lawmakers, he observes. “Having institutions that are committed to Black communities in and of itself has value because we don’t know what the temperature of the nation is going to be in the future.”
When “Black folks are not at the table,” he contends, policy solutions may be incomplete and less thorough. He offers one real-world example. He said that the Joint Center had “done some work with a major progressive think tank” which he chose not to name. Its reform proposal “would really result in more black women going to prison without really increasing public safety in our communities,” Overton says. When the Joint Center “pushed back,” the proposal was revised.
Likewise, the assumption that Black Americans were not earning as much as white Americans often focused on African-Americans needing more skills and better credentials to compete for better-paying jobs. It took a Black economist, Overton says, to discover that the typical white household headed by someone with only a high school diploma has a higher net worth than the typical Black household headed by someone with a college degree. Clearly, there are other factors at play, Overton says, “whether it is networks, whether it is implicit bias, whatever it is, there are some other factors that drive economic issues that drive how the world works. And these other issues need to be taken into account in terms of policy, both for better solutions for our nation and also so that Black communities can exercise agency, as we solve this problem of systemic racism.”
Another place where the Black perspective makes a difference is the future of work, as many jobs are being eliminated by new technology with the transition accelerated by the pandemic. Before the Joint Center started looking at the issue, he says, the question boiled down to “Would there be more jobs or no jobs?”
The impact on the poor, or the “racial implications” of these major shifts were “under-examined,” he says. The Joint Center “established the significance of race” in the national discussion. It aims to be the thought leader addressing the challenge of providing “real pathways for Black communities to participate in the new post-COVID economy,” Overton says.
Likewise, in testimony before Congress and other public forums, the Joint Center has urged Congress and federal regulators to ensure that major online platforms block the circulation of disinformation aiming to suppress the Black vote, and to ban ads that discriminate against Black Americans when it comes to housing and employment.
Overton says the Joint Center’s location in D.C. is a benefit, because it makes it easier to develop relationships on Capitol Hill, particularly with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). But he makes clear that he wants the Joint Center to engage directly with Black communities throughout the country.
For that reason, the staff he hires are required to have not only technical expertise, but be able to “walk into a hotel conference room in Tunica, Mississippi, and talk to community leaders, and not look at them as specimens, or items to be studied, but as peers … folks we’re serving and really learning from.”
Overton said his plans for 2020 had been quite different before the pandemic. “This was supposed to be a scaling year, where we’d … explain to funders all the things we could do if we had resources. … Then March came, and there was a need for us to act,” he said. “We’d be tone-deaf, we didn’t step up to the plate … doing whatever we could with regard to COVID and the stimulus.” The pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd, he adds, “just renewed our sense of purpose.”
The Joint Center urged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to include racial data on COVID deaths, which demonstrated the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on people of color. It also began publishing a weekly newsletter informing Black communities outside the Beltway about “what was happening on the stimulus,” Overton says. Staff worked well remotely, he says, and were able to continue to “serve our community.”
In 2021, the Joint Center will have a director of development and Overton also intends to hire a communications director to oversee a “very vibrant communications shop.” He’s looking to hire additional “superstars” to produce quality work in a “well-run Black organization,” he says. He adds, however, that the Joint Center’s culture is also important to him. “There are a lot of nonprofits that may have big names on the outside, but … internally, may be perceived as sweatshops,” Overton says. “As we grow, I want to have an environment where folks are excited about coming to work, in part because of the honor of serving black communities,” but also because it is “a good and healthy place to work.”
