Stanford Impact Labs Launches Fellowship for Local Government Staff

For the past three years, Stanford Impact Labs’ suite of fellowship programs has been training and supporting faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and PhD students to conduct research in partnership with public or civic organizations. We crafted these programs to support a pipeline of scholars equipped with the necessary skills to work closely with governments, industry, philanthropy, and nonprofit institutions to generate evidence and insights that are put into practice. 

This year, Stanford Impact Labs launches a new fellowship program designed specifically for staff in local governments in California who are using data and evidence to move a policy priority from idea to implementation. 

Why?

City governments, county governments, and local government agencies are part of the broadest infrastructure to provide quality health services and public education, mitigate the effects of climate change, and spur economic development. They can also be a key vehicle for scaling solutions by developing best practices and sharing what works. When their programs and services are designed intentionally to be equitable, based in evidence, and responsive to community needs, they have the opportunity to be the first line of response to social problems and improve the conditions of people’s lives. 

As local governments work to address these kinds of social problems (and others) in their communities, they face challenges in the research they’re already doing: collecting and organizing data, analyzing that data to unlock insights, and using those insights to inform critical decisions.

At the same time, the research produced by universities frequently does not meet local government requirements. All too often, academia prioritizes publication in disciplinary journals and operates in silos, which distorts incentives away from the practical solutions that governments look for. 

To help bridge this divide, Stanford Impact Labs staff will support an inaugural cohort of up to 10 fellows over a one-year period with a combination of workshops, training, peer-learning, one-on-one support, and financial resources. These offerings will align behind local government staff identifying research questions (as well as the data and evidence needed to answer those questions), planning for data collection and analysis, and moving toward policy implementation. 

In order to shape this fellowship to best match local government needs, we spoke with more than 30 practitioners in city, county, regional, state, and federal governments, and in organizations that serve them. Those conversations illuminated the following few key themes:

1. Many organizations and funders that support governments’ use of evidence for impact (at any level) tend to focus on relatively well-resourced cities like San Francisco and Boston, with lots of capacity for experimentation.

Functionally, though, this leaves the rest of the country behind. Smaller cities and counties can be left to develop their own capacity as learning institutions. We believe that all local governments should have access to cutting-edge research and the ability to apply data and evidence in their own contexts in order to meet the problems of our time. So we’ve designed our fellowship to focus on cities and counties that have not benefited from the policy and programmatic initiatives nationwide to support evidence-based policy and innovation.

We know that institutions without adequate resources can be some of the most innovative — often out of necessity — and we hope to learn from, and invest in, the work many cities and counties are already doing to use data and evidence systematically to achieve their policy goals.

2. The outcomes of programs that support career staff tend to be longer-lived than those that focus only on elected officials or a short-term fellow.

While there are certainly strategic reasons to work with elected officials, programs that require the engagement of elected officials often have a built-in time limit. With no guarantee that officials will be re-elected or that their successors will share their goals, many programs face the prospect of irrelevance in future administrations.

Similarly, programs designed around a short-term contributor, employee, contractor, or fellow frequently falter once that temporary engagement is over because the work can fall on the shoulders of one or more designees that are already at capacity in their day-to-day responsibilities. To address both of these challenges, our fellowship will bolster the work of career staff who are already in place. We’ll provide support and resources as staff use data and evidence in their work and institutionalize practices that can make doing so easier in the future. 

3. Finally, local governments are collecting and analyzing data and evidence all the time but can face institutional challenges in putting it to use.

Local governments collect and analyze myriad forms of data about the programs and services they provide. At the same time, we heard that many municipalities face challenges from entrenched processes and legacy systems; these obstacles can get in the way of harnessing data and evidence to answer questions about both program and policy effectiveness and day-to-day operations.

To help address those obstacles, the Evidence for Policy Fellowship will provide resources to support governments in improving their data and evidence capabilities and infrastructure, whether they need to contract for data analysis, modernize data storage, or purchase software licenses to help make their data more accessible and actionable.

We are excited about the opportunity to build deliberate pathways that support the staff in local governments as they work toward data- and evidence-based policy goals that address inequity. We recognize it is no small challenge to define research questions about a policy priority, identify the data and evidence needed to answer those questions, and align resources in support of goals — all while functioning in a resource-constrained environment.

This fellowship is just one step toward Stanford Impact Labs’ vision of a world in which the tools and skills of social science can be applied across all sectors to move the needle on persistent social problems.