Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Research-Practitioner Partnerships to Create Evidence-Based Anti-Poverty Programs

(Poverty and Income Policy)

The non-profit service provider sector spends more than $200 billion each year fighting poverty in the U.S. Despite the scale of such efforts, very little is known about their impact, because the local service providers who implement these programs have only limited interaction with the research community that studies them. This panel demonstrates how researcher-practitioner partnerships can bridge this gap in order to generate rigorous evidence of innovative anti-poverty programs. The panel participants will include both practitioners and researchers. Each of the three research papers examines an impact evaluation where practitioners were actively involved. For each paper, the researcher will discuss the study design and the results. But the practitioner involved in the study will be in attendance and available to comment on the details of the intervention and any issues encountered with incorporating a rigorous impact evaluation into the intervention. All three papers examine a program designed to improve outcomes for the disadvantaged whether by promoting success in community college, preventing homelessness through emergency assistance, or reducing recidivism through a diversion program. The practitioners who will participate in this panel work at local non-profit service agencies committed to improving the effectiveness of their anti-poverty programs through research. These providers include Catholic Charities Fort Worth, the Homeless Prevention Call Center of Chicago, and the Thomas N. Frederick Juvenile Justice Center in St. Joseph County, IN. The goal of this panel is two-fold: to present new results on the effectiveness of programs that target vulnerable populations, and to show how researchers and practitioners can collaborate to demonstrate program effectiveness and promote evidence-based program design.