Stanford Impact Labs Launches Fellowship for Nonprofit Organizations

Stanford Impact Labs is excited to launch a new fellowship program designed for California-based nonprofit and community organizations keen to leverage data and evidence to drive the impact of their work. The nine-month Evidence for Change fellowship offers cohort workshops, mentorship, and $50,000 in funding to social sector organizations to support the development and implementation of an evidence plan.

We believe that putting social science to work for society means equipping both researchers and practitioners with innovative strategies to make use of evidence and data. We are hopeful that this fellowship can help break down some of the walls that often exist around research universities and offer a way for resources and tools to harness data and evidence to become more broadly accessible.

Through the process of conceptualizing this new fellowship, our team engaged with leaders of social sector organizations, as well as community-based researchers and funders, to better understand both need and demand. We are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their expertise with us and are pleased to share the three key insights that have guided the design of this fellowship:

1. Most social sector organizations are collecting a lot of data and evidence, but the information gathered does not necessarily align with their needs and learning goals. Too often, organizations are over-burdened with data requests from funders, but this data isn’t necessarily the right data to answer the questions they are grappling with, such as: how to prioritize resources, how to reach more people, or how to improve programs and services.
2. In the same way that researchers need to engage practitioners throughout any evidence process, practitioners want to use the process of generating and using evidence to engage communities. The process of collecting evidence, analyzing it, and using it to make decisions should be a vehicle through which diverse community voices are sought out and heard: What do people want and need? How can organizations best serve these needs? What programs or policies work best for the community? How can they be improved?
3. The type of research conducted in academic institutions may not be useful for social sector organizations: It takes too long, it doesn’t always ask the right questions, and there isn’t enough engagement from the practitioners themselves throughout the process. The culture and demands of academia — to publish and to remain an objective outsider — make this a difficult tension to navigate. Practitioners want to be empowered with tools and resources to identify, collect, and use data and evidence themselves and to be able to collaborate with academic partners on a level playing field. This approach is more likely to be responsive to the context in which social sector organizations operate and to result in actionable and timely evidence that meets their learning needs.

The Evidence for Change fellowship will provide funding, mentorship, and peer workshopping to social sector organizations that want to institutionalize using evidence to guide decision-making and drive toward program goals. 

Participants will be supported to: 

• define their own learning agenda
• identify the data that matters to them
• develop a plan for how to get and use the evidence they need. 

Historically, this kind of analytical work from social sector organizations has often not been recognized, resourced, or lifted up as research, despite being the most relevant and useful for practitioners. We believe this work is crucial and see it as a form of research that prioritizes the wisdom and lived experience of impacted communities as well as those working every day to address injustice.