I Am Empowered - I am the National Urban League

Dr. Valerie Rawlston Wilson is an economist and Vice President of Research at the National Urban League Policy Institute in Washington, DC where she chairs the National Urban League’s Research Council and is responsible for planning and directing the Policy Institute’s Research Agenda. She is also a member of the National Urban League President’s Council of Economic Advisors, which assists the League in shaping national economic policy. Under her direction, the Policy Institute recently launched State of Urban Jobs, a component of Iamempowered.com, that features the Institute’s esteemed research and policy analysis and serves as a vehicle for communicating the latest information related to African-American and urban employment issues. Dr. Wilson is also one of the primary architects of the National Urban League’s Plan for Putting Americans Back to Work, a bold 6-point job creation plan for urban America, and The Opportunity Compact: Blueprint for Economic Equality which formally defines the public policy priorities underlying the National Urban League’s Economic Empowerment agenda. Dr. Wilson has served as Managing Editor, Associate Editor and as a contributing author for The State of Black America report and oversees production of the National Urban League’s annual Equality Index.

Dr. Wilson earned a PhD from the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her fields of specialization include labor economics, racial and economic inequality, and economics of higher education. She has authored a number of publications on topics related to these areas and has appeared in print, television and radio media, including C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, National Public Radio, USA Today and Time magazine. This past spring, through the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs, she was selected to deliver the keynote address at an event on Minority Economic Empowerment at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.