Social and Economic Policy Expert Indivar Dutta-Gupta Named Executive Director of Center for Law and Social Policy

Indian American Indivar Dutta-Gupta is joining the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) as executive director. He currently is co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality (GCPI). He assumes leadership of the national anti-poverty and racial justice organization on June 1, succeeding Olivia Golden who has served as the executive director of CLASP since 2013.

As co-executive director of the GCPI, Dutta-Gupta “leads work to develop and advance policy recommendations that alleviate poverty and inequality, advance racial and gender equity, and expand economic inclusion for all people in the United States,” according to a CLASp press release.

He joined the center in 2014 as a senior fellow and director of the Project on Deep Poverty and later founded the Economic Security & Opportunity Initiative (ESOI) of GCPI in 2016. “Under his leadership, the ESOI has grown in size and influence,” CLASP said. In its first year, the organization had only two staff members. Five years later, “the ESOI is flourishing with 18 staff members – and growing,” it added. 

“I’m honored and delighted to be joining CLASP – an organization with a half-century track record of marshaling lived experience, careful analysis, technical assistance, and strategic advocacy,” he said in the press release. 

Dutta-Gupta serves as a board member for two nonpartisan groups – Indivisible Civics and the National Academy of Social Insurance. He is an advisor for the Aspen Institute’s Benefits 21 Initiative, Liberation in a Generation, and The Policy Academies. 

Before joining GCPI, he led strategic initiatives for major philanthropies, children’s groups, and workers’ organizations as project director at Freedman Consulting, LLC. Before that role, he was a senior policy advisor at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, focusing on budget and tax policies and cross-cutting low-income issues. He has advised presidential and Congressional candidates and campaigns on various social and economic policies.

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Earlier in his career, he served as Ways and Means Committee Professional Staff in the U.S. House of Representatives for the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support. He was a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow and then a Consultant to the Poverty Task Force at the Center for American Progress and a Food Stamp Outreach Specialist at DC Hunger Solutions. 

He received his BA with honors from the University of Chicago in Law, Letters, and Society and in Political Science and is a Harry S. Truman Scholar (2004). He has been named a Champion for Children by the First Focus Campaign for Children and was awarded the Congressional Hunger Center Alumni Leadership Award (2016). He was named one of Washington Life magazine’s most Influential 40-And-Under Leaders (2013) and Rising Stars 40 And Under (2016, 2017). He lives in Washington, DC, with his partner, Shally, and their two children.