Evidence Matters: How Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships Can Drive Scale and Replication of Effective Interventions

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Scaling and replicating evidence-based interventions is among the most pressing challenges in public policy research. As federal leadership on evidence-based policy innovation has become less certain, state and local governments face growing pressure to lead — to identify what works, invest accordingly, and share lessons across jurisdictions. Yet research projects are often designed to answer a single question in a single place, leaving hard-won lessons locked in the host community and limiting their broader impact. This roundtable argues that researchers and government partners can and should approach their collaborations with both the long view and the horizon of scale and replication in mind — and that doing so creates compounding benefits for the host community itself.

This session draws on two sustained research-practice partnerships as anchoring cases:  a decade-long collaboration between Northeastern University (NEU) and the City of Boston on its Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), and a partnership between the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at Notre Dame (LEO) and Destination Home in Santa Clara County on homelessness prevention. The NEU-Boston partnership has grown from a single evaluation into a joint research agenda that has contributed to the continuous improvement of the program and a transformative municipal investment that ensures all Boston Public School students who want a summer job can have one. The LEO-Destination Home partnership not only built rigorous evidence on homelessness prevention that shaped Santa Clara County’s investments and strategy but also seeded Right at Home, a national replication initiative now operating across ten pilot communities.

Together, these cases open a set of questions this roundtable will put to speakers and audience alike:  What makes such partnerships endure — and ultimately grow and travel? How can partnerships be designed from the outset with scale and replication in mind, while still genuinely serving the host community first? How does rigorous evidence build the internal case for scaling within a jurisdiction? And when an intervention has been replicated across diverse contexts, how do communities continue to learn from one another? 

Speakers will draw on hard-won experience to offer practical guidance for researchers seeking to engage more deeply with government partners. Long-term partnerships require moving at the speed of trust: grounding research aims in the decisions practitioners actually face, treating evaluation as a continuous and collaborative cycle of learning rather than a one-time deliverable, and finding productive meaning even in null results. They also require researcher-practitioner teams to keep one eye on scale and replication from the outset — asking not only what works here, but what lessons can travel, and how communities that adopt an intervention can intentionally learn from one another.

Speakers bring complementary vantage points across research, local government, federal policy, and multi-site implementation. This roundtable is designed to generate frank, experience-grounded conversation about what researchers, practitioners, and government partners can do to ensure rigorous evidence reaches — and keeps improving outcomes for — the communities that need it most.

Policy Area

• Public and Nonprofit Management and Finance

Moderator

• Sara van Nes, J-PAL North America

Organizer

• Laina Sonterblum, J-PAL North America

Speakers

• David C Phillips, University of Notre Dame

• Alicia Sasser Modestino, Northeastern University

• Allison Vernerey, City of Boston Office of Youth Employment

• Sarah Dickerson, City of Asheville