Delivering Research Tools Inside Local Government

This year, Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) expanded our fellowship offerings by launching two brand-new programs for practitioners beyond the university. As SIL prepares to welcome the inaugural cohort of Evidence for Policy fellows to campus, we sat down with Hana Passen, Senior Strategy Advisor, to talk about why this program matters. 

What is the Evidence for Policy Fellowship? 

Fundamentally, it’s a fellowship program designed to bring some of the approaches and tools of academic research to folks in local government. People who work in government are doing research every day; they’re connecting with residents, collecting data about government services, identifying areas for improvement, and working to evaluate the success of various policies and programs. We have heard over and over again from peers and colleagues in government that many staffers are hungry for more effective ways to use the information they gather to make decisions in their work.

This fellowship is designed to meet that need.

What are some of the goals of the fellowship?

Before launching Evidence for Policy, we held a series of conversations to try and understand the need for research in government. In those conversations, we heard an overwhelming desire for evidence-based approaches to building economic equity and social mobility. So, the first goal of the fellowship is to deliver on that need, and support government staff in trying different ways to move the needle on those issues in their own communities. Prospective fellows apply to the program with projects in mind, and we support those projects over the year. 

We’re balancing that goal, however, with the understanding that some experiments teach us what doesn’t work! So the second goal of the fellowship is to train fellows with a more general set of skills, tools, and approaches that they can apply broadly beyond the fellowship project. This professional development is intended to last beyond the fellowship year, and to support a sustained push for the use of these skills in government. 

Why the focus on government staff? 

The evidence-based policy landscape is crowded.  There are plenty of organizations doing great work to build government capacity to use data and analytics. In some early conversations about where Stanford Impact Labs might contribute to the ecosystem, we heard that mayors, elected officials, and their appointed staff have frequent opportunities to learn these skills from programs like Results for America, i-Teams, and the City Leadership Initiative, but there are fewer opportunities for career staff to do the same. We also decided to focus our fellowship on mid-career staff, who can continue to apply the skills from the fellowship to other work as they progress in their government careers. 

The first cohort of fellows come from all over California, but none of the biggest cities are represented. Why is that? 

As we designed the fellowship, a major area of focus was equity. We knew that cities like San Francisco, Oakland, LA, and Stockton (to name a few) are frequent recipients of funding and programs designed to support the use of evidence for policy making. Rather than doubling down in those places, we decided to instead focus on accepting fellows from places that might not otherwise have access to these kinds of opportunities. Our team developed a set of eligibility criteria to steer resources to counties and smaller cities, and we did direct outreach to encourage applications from across the state. We’re thrilled by the projects people proposed.

What will the fellowship entail?

There are a few key pieces to this fellowship. First, the fellows will engage in an in-person kickoff workshop, designed to further scope and refine their projects for the year, enable cross-cohort peer learning, and build community. Over the next ten months, fellows will engage approximately monthly in online workshops designed to further build skills and approaches to using evidence in government. In between cohort learning sessions, fellows (and their colleagues) will also receive targeted coaching and support from the Evidence for Policy team, as they apply skills from the online sessions to their own projects. At the end of the fellowship, Fellows will gather for a cohort closing workshop, where they will reflect, plan for the future, and share what they’ve learned. 

Finally, fellows will receive a $50,000 grant to be spent flexibly on any costs associated with their project - staff time, interns, consultants, software licenses, etc. We believe that the cohort training, individualized support, and infusion of resources dedicated to learning and experimentation will allow for progress on the fellowship projects, and for fellows to build their own approaches to using data and evidence in their work.