Joshua Dwyer
Nonprofit Leadership | Public Policy | Government Affairs
About Joshua
Joshua Dwyer is an accomplished executive with a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University. He has extensive experience in all aspects of non-profit advocacy leadership, including fundraising, finance and budgeting, operations, compliance, strategic planning, stakeholder management, project and team management, coalition building, policy research and analysis, media relations, government affairs, negotiation, rule-making, and policy implementation.
In 2020, he founded the Excellence Project to advocate for policies that help identify and cultivate the talents of students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds, who are often overlooked for gifted programs and accelerated learning opportunities. As the Executive Director, he fundraised more than $750,000, wrote and published research showing that Illinois does a poor job of identifying its talented students, and introduced and lobbied for two laws – one that would provide districts with state funding to provide universal screening for gifted identification and another that would give low-income students state-funded scholarships to participate in out-of-school enrichment activities.
This work is a continuation of work he began at Empower Illinois as the organization’s Policy and Government Affairs Director. While there, he wrote and published multiple reports that were used as the evidence-base to lobby for five policies that he wrote that eventually became law. These include a $250 tax credit for teachers’ out-of-pocket expenses; a commission to study course availability; a reform of districts’ gifted identification processes to qualify for state grants, and a statewide acceleration policy that allows students to enter school early, take above grade level coursework, skip courses, or graduate early.
The most important legislative win of his career, though, was the Invest in Kids Act – the first blue-state tax credit scholarship program. Over the past five years, the tax credit has raised over $308 million and has funded more than 38,000 scholarships.
He is passionate about his work and enjoys using his skills and experience to help better peoples’ lives through research-based public policy.
If you are looking for a professional to help grow your organization and make real-world impact, he’s your person. He is also available for speaking opportunities on a variety of topics such as starting and growing a non-profit organization, all aspects of education policy, how to take a law from the idea stage through implementation, as well as many other issues. Feel free to message him, he’d love to chat.