Living Their Genius: Jared Joiner
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
The Living Their Genius series is dedicated to profiling the organizations and people who compose the wider community of The Equity Lab. Even when you may feel alone in this work, we hope these highlights will remind you that we are always doing this together. As bell hooks encourages us, “When we talk about that which will sustain and nurture our spiritual growth as a people, we must once again talk about the importance of community. For one of the most vital ways that we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
About a decade ago, Jared Joiner was in graduate school studying mind and brain education.
At the time, he says he was keenly aware—and maybe a little envious—of his fellow students whose coursework allowed them more time to explore topics in sociology, youth empowerment, and community organizing in education. However, his own curriculum and even his career immediately after graduation didn’t allow him a lot of space to apply these ideas and frameworks in the way he really wanted to.
Before working in philanthropy, Jared held roles at Boston Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, and Sokikom (an elementary mathematics edtech company). While each of these roles touched on a different aspect of his expertise and skill set, Jared noticed a trend: stakeholder engagement could have been more bidirectional.
While parents were discussed in policy making rooms, he observed that those families were very rarely involved in the decision making around their students or the schools they attended each day. Jared says, “It was very rare or an afterthought to try to involve youth or families or others in the design of the work.” Throughout much of his career, he frequently remembers being one of a few Black people, and often, the only Black man, in the room at any given time. And yet, when school districts were serving primarily Black and brown students, that isolation often felt glaring and like a dangerous impediment to designing policies that would actually help students and families.
About 7 months into his role in philanthropy, he became a Nexus Fellow with The Equity Lab. And he says that while his work was incredibly exciting before his time at Nexus, none of it spoke to the pieces of his consciousness that had been activated while he was in grad school and in the ten years since. A lot of his work dealt with the learning sciences, narrowly construed, but he knew it could be — and in fact, it should be — more.
Through Nexus, Jared saw that he needed to move away from a more academic understanding of racial equity and inclusion to a more applied approach. But how to begin?
“It stirred me, it rocked me. When I got back to California, all I could talk about was, ‘Why am I making these decisions? Why am I not involving youth or families or communities in the work? And I couldn't stop, and it just kind of became this huge crescendo over each of the four weeks of Nexus that year.’”
“It stirred me, it rocked me. When I got back to California, all I could talk about was, ‘Why am I making these decisions? Why am I not involving youth or families or communities in the work? And I couldn’t stop, and it just kind of became this huge crescendo over each of the four weeks of Nexus that year.”
Through his Nexus coaching and workshops, Jared started paying more attention to the feelings of discomfort in his body, the signals that were telling him to use his voice. Those feelings encouraged him to speak up—when in previous roles at other organizations he did not feel empowered to do so. He resolved that if he wasn’t leaning into discomfort as a leader to apply a racial equity lens to his work, then he wasn’t taking full advantage of the privileged seat he inhabited. Between 2019 and 2020, his work changed a lot. He began to incorporate racial equity strategies within his portfolio. Using his voice more fully demonstrated his capacity for leadership, thus earning him a promotion and a new body of work. Jared’s participation in Nexus laid groundwork for responsive COVID grantmaking he led, and he also suggested, “The Equity Lab’s coaching and support of program officers within philanthropies across the country helped the sector as a whole.”
For Jared, while the professional (and hopefully sector-level) impact of his Nexus experience has been critical, it has also been a personal journey. He says when he entered philanthropy he did, to a certain extent, believe in the expertise of the sector’s leaders and his grantmaking reflected that. But since Nexus, something has shifted, “Now I think that, our job as program officers, is to unlock this capital and right-size where it goes.” He would not have been comfortable doing that in 2018 or 2019. But now he knows, “Nobody’s answers internally are any better than the answers that are in communities currently.”
In 2020, Jared was tasked with leading the content development for a new edtech tool to support teacher and student relationships. Many edtech companies might launch this sort of scope of work by centering traditional “experts,” but Jared saw an opportunity to design at the margins alongside the folks who are typically left out of product development: students and teachers. He built an inclusive content development strategy that centered youth, educators, researchers, and practitioners through partnerships with organizations like Black Teacher Collaborative, GripTape, Teach Plus, and Search Institute. Similarly, in 2021, Jared was charged with standing up a program that centered grantee partners (like Kingmakers of Oakland) to co-construct grantmaking alongside program officers. The goal was to better address the challenges identified by organizations on the ground (and make better use of community assets), instead of relying on assumptions made through deficit lenses.
These two workstreams demonstrate what Jared says walking in his professional power today and in the future means, “Centering relationships in my work and also not feeling beholden to how things were done and how things are usually done in either philanthropy or educational technology.” His most radical vision for his own professional journey and for the work of philanthropy has yet to be realized, but he says he knows it can be if he just keeps pushing into the discomfort he’s learned to embrace.
About Jared Joiner
Jared Joiner leads the Educational Practice portfolio at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which is focused on promoting practices, tools, strategies, and pedagogies grounded in the sciences of learning and human development. Prior to joining the Education team at CZI, Jared served as Chief of Staff in the Department of Technology at San Francisco Unified School District, and before that, as a product manager at an educational technology startup.
Jared’s first foray into scaling solutions in education was working on human capital transformation in the Boston Public Schools, where his team worked to improve educator evaluation, hiring, and diversity in Boston’s classrooms.
Jared began his career in public education as a bilingual math and science teacher at the Next Step Public Charter School in Washington, DC. He earned his Ed.M. with a concentration in Mind, Brain, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy.
In his spare time, he completes triathlons (slowly), plays on a semi-pro lacrosse team, and watches lots of movies — regardless of their Rotten Tomatoes score.