Jenice R. Robinson
Communications DirectorJenice joined ITEP in early 2014. Her role includes leading ITEP’s external communications and ensuring its tax policy research and analyses are accessible to a wide variety of audiences. To this end, she develops, implements and advises on communications strategies to support ITEP’s mission to secure sustainable, progressive tax policies at the local, state and federal levels. She draws on years of experience working on anti-poverty and social justice issues to inform her occasional blogs and commentary about the intersection of tax policy and income inequality.
Jenice has more than 20 years of experience in strategic communications and media relations, including serving as the national media director for Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where she wrote executive speeches and op-eds; regularly booked the union president on national broadcast media; directed the union’s media outreach during the 2012 election cycle, and helped bring media attention to organizing campaigns on behalf of the union’s members. Her previous experience also includes building and implementing a strategic communications program from the ground up at CLASP (an anti-poverty policy group). She also led media relations at the National Women’s Law Center, where she closely worked with senior legal scholars and researchers and used her media outreach, communications and writing skills to elevate the center’s legal, campaign and policy work.
Jenice is a proud but disenfranchised Washingtonian. Like the other 700,000+ residents of the District of Columbia, she dutifully pays her federal income taxes. The irony of working on issues of tax fairness while being taxed without representation is not lost on her.
jenice at itep.orgRecent Publications and Posts view more
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Opportunity Zones Have Nothing to Do with Reparations, Except …
Among other things, this blog highlights how federal, state and local policies systematically work to reinforce the racial wealth gap by, for example, using the tax code to redistribute the nation’s wealth to billionaire developers and keeping low-income people of color in a perpetual cycle of debt through fines and fees to fund local governments. Opportunity zones and the top-heavy 2017 tax law are emblematic of a long history of policymaking that advantages wealthy white families.
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Bootstraps Remain an Ineffective Tool for Combatting Poverty
Policymakers and the public widely agree that economic inequality is the social policy problem of our age. It threatens the livelihoods of millions of children and adults, and it even threatens our democracy. Although some say Americans could fix it themselves by simply rolling up their sleeves, as a sub-headline in a March U.S. News and World Report column implied, the reality is different.