How to Partner With Us

A partnership with LEO is just that—a partnership. We learn together, work together, and grow together. We struggle with hard questions, we lift one another up, and we problem solve until we get answers. 

If you are interested in working with LEO, we invite you to learn more about what that entails. Please reach out to us to get going on building evidence that will light the path to learning what works. Building evidence through our LEO partnership process ensures that poverty doesn’t win—but that you and the people you serve do!

1. Connect. We find and start conversations with social sector leaders who want to disrupt the anti-poverty space by creating evidence and powering their service with research. 
2. Invite. We invite poverty’s fiercest adversaries to apply to be a part of our partnership program, an experience aimed at helping them understand, design, and launch a research study. We offer these devoted service providers a deep sense of fulfillment from learning what works and sharing it with more people who need it. 
3. Learn. Our partners start their LEO journey with a workshop to learn the ins and outs of impact evaluation, as well as how to create a culture of learning at their organizations. 
4. Design. Our partners work with the LEO research team to design their research studies. Together they develop key outcomes, solidify their interventions, plan the recruitment and selection process, and synthesize administrative factors. 
5. Present. The research design work culminates with a second workshop where our partners share their research designs with experienced and passionate researchers from Notre Dame and across the country, as well as with funders who would like to consider investing.
6. Plan. LEO’s research team leads our partners through all the necessary steps to launch their research studies.
7. Launch. The day a research study goes live is a huge milestone, because we all agree—the longer successes remain obscured, the longer poverty thrives. 
8. Discover. As we make discoveries, we share them with our partners. We work with them to communicate what we learn to various internal and external stakeholders. We also help them modify their interventions, if needed, based on what we’ve come to understand about their impact. 
9. Disseminate. We share what we learn with others so every success can unleash thousands more. We share information with the broader poverty-fighting community of providers and decision makers, and plan to grow local efforts and replicate promising programs throughout the nation.