A handful of institutions turn donor capital into government policy for a living. Black business capital funds almost none of them, on any continent. (Part 1 of 6)
Call it what it is.
A think tank is an operating company.
It raises capital, it hires talent, it produces a product, and it sells that product to the people who write laws, set trade terms, and decide who gets access to capital.
The top five American institutions in this category brought in a combined $1.3 billion in their most recent reported fiscal years.
There are between 8,000 and 10,000 of these organizations operating worldwide, and the U.S. holds roughly a fifth of them. None of that is theoretical. It is a functioning market, with real revenue, real donors, and real returns measured in legislation.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the institution most often called America's Black think tank, reported $11.5 million in total assets and $3.4 million in revenue for its 2024 fiscal year.
In the same period, six family fortunes moved more than $120 million into a single policy advisory network — Project 2025 — since 2020 alone.
Not over a lifetime.
Since 2020.
That is the gap, stated in dollars, not sentiment.
Its largest identifiable gift tied to a Black-led philanthropy is $500,000, from the TD Jakes Foundation. Individual grants from Hewlett and Robert Wood Johnson, in the same ledger, run larger than that.
The institution built to represent Black political and economic interests in Washington is substantially underwritten by the same foundations that fund everyone else's institutions too.
That is not an insult to the Joint Center. It is a statement about who has been willing to capitalize permanent policy infrastructure and who has not.
In the United Kingdom, the Black Policy Institute has been doing real racial-equity policy work since 2020, and no public filing exists showing what it actually runs on.
In the Caribbean, the region's first economics-focused think tank, CAPRI, operates out of the University of the West Indies rather than as an independently capitalized institution answering to regional Black business.
In Africa, the most serious recent investment in policy research capacity — $90 million across 24 institutions in 11 countries — came from Hewlett, the Gates Foundation, and Canada's IDRC, not from African capital.
Four regions, four different funding stories, one identical pattern: the infrastructure exists in small, dependent form, or it does not exist at all.
It is a statement of fact about where capital has and has not gone, and an argument that the fix runs through the same channels that built the wealth in the first place — corporate treasuries, family offices, and diaspora capital, deployed with the same discipline applied to any other investment.
The rest of this series will trace exactly where that capital has gone instead, who has been writing the policy that affects Black business in its absence, and what building this infrastructure would actually require.
