We’ve all heard Rome wasn’t built in a day. And we’ve all seen the influences of the Romans in our daily lives. For all their faults, the Romans nearly perfected several crafts of their time, including law, language, and a calendar system. They engineered roads, built aqueducts to transport water, improved sanitation with public toilets, created central heat, and developed public welfare systems. They spread these systems across continents that changed the world. But it’s easy to imagine that first—
First there were problems to be solved, an urgency to be had. People who cared about issues, people who studied, people who experimented and risked the status quo. There were likely moments of failure, fear, and frustration that things might not work. Which led to repetition, observation, and success. And then one day, they moved their learnings forward to create inventions and structures that continue to make an impact centuries later.
At the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), the genesis of the work is in scouting and finding these inventors, poverty’s fiercest adversaries who really have something that can change things for the better. Then comes rigorous study and research. But LEO’s mission extends beyond generating evidence; they turn that evidence into action. Replication brings a program to new contexts, while scaling adapts it to expand its reach.
Scaling evidence-based solutions expands both reach and knowledge. As they replicate programs, LEO conducts research to refine the replication process, offering both academic and practical insights. With a structured approach, programs move through Phase I (Defining the Program), Phase II (Packaging the Program), and Phase III (Replicating the Program) after demonstrating impact through randomized controlled trials.
Each spring, LEO hosts an Impact Workshop for partner agencies who are ready to expand their programs through replication sites, social franchising, toolkits, and other methods. For agency partners, scaling their signature programs is often a major goal in this line of work. But scale is not a beginning or an end. It is a milestone in a longer journey, one marked by iteration, evidence, and hard-won progress.
The journey to impact is made up of lessons that are anything but small. The sections below explore what some of these learnings and stops along the journey mean for LEO’s partners as they walk the path to impact.
For Cindy Casey of Catholic Charities Fort Worth, the journey began with a powerful realization: the systems meant to support people in poverty were often making things worse. Padua, the program she helped build, came to fruition because of a lived frustration with a system that wasn’t working.
“In 2014, as we were designing Padua, we had three goals,” Casey explains. “To walk alongside families on their journey out of poverty, to really gather the data and identify those
key points, and to advocate for change nationwide.” That final goal—systemic change—would eventually define the program’s trajectory. But it was far from an immediate fix.
Across LEO’s network of partners, one of the most important milestones on the path to impact is the transition from believing a program works to proving it does.
The journey to impact is made up of lessons that are anything but small.
At NPower, a program that provides technology training and career opportunities, that shift marked a turning point. Kim Mitchell recalls a time when the organization knew it was making
a difference but lacked the external validation to show it. “We are not the only ones that can report our impact,” she says. “We need to have more objective, external, and research-backed activities that would help to tell the story of impact.”
Through a randomized controlled trial alongside LEO, NPower moved beyond internal confidence to external evidence. The process itself drove the clarity required to take things to the next level. What exactly drives these successful outcomes? What must be preserved as the program grows?
The moment when data replaces assumption is key to getting to the next level. It requires partner agencies to open themselves up to scrutiny and to rethink long-held practices. But it is also what makes scale possible.
In some cases, the journey to impact reveals not just what works, but also what those future challenges might be. For example, LEO’s study of Padua found that Padua participants were 67% more likely to be employed full-time (among those unemployed at start of program) and 46% more likely to see an increase in monthly earnings, compared to a control group. Results are strong, but there are still questions about a path to sustainability. These are questions replication can help answer.
Social service providers often face challenges in this process, such as packaging programs for replication, resource limitations, and balancing fidelity with local adaptation. In partnership with franchising experts, LEO helps overcome these barriers by applying best practices from research and the franchising industry. They package programs for successful launch and expansion to communities in need, paving the way for lasting change.
At King County Metro, Alyson Hams saw firsthand how data can expose the hidden barriers to scale. The ORCA LIFT program, which provides reducedfare transit to low-income riders, was already helping people access jobs, education, and essential services.
“It’s really good having data,” Hams says. “We want to scale up—and we can’t right now.” The obstacle wasn’t the program; it was the system surrounding it: legacy technology, complex enrollment processes, and administrative constraints that made expansion difficult. Identifying those limitations is a part of the journey to chart a path forward. King County is taking a unique path to take their evidence to scale. The program will create a toolkit with best practices from transportation systems across the US implementing reduced fare transit
subsidies.
For some partners, the enlightening challenges encountered along the journey are not just operational; they are cultural. At the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office, Captain Salome Lopez
and Kristina Luera manage a program that focuses on early intervention, targeting individuals before patterns of incarceration become a way of life. What sets their program apart is a
focus on trauma.
Introducing this kind of approach in a correctional setting is not for the faint of heart. Skepticism is common. Change is slow. But here, too, evidence becomes a turning point. “With the data, we’re seeing improvements and changes, behavior-wise,” Lopez says. That proof helps shift mindsets, opening the door for broader adoption in the future.
Behind each successful model in LEO’s portfolio of partners is a network of researchers, funders, governments, and nonprofits, all working together to move from evidence to action.
Organizations like Arnold Ventures play a critical role in this ecosystem. As Justin Milner explains, the goal is not just to fund research but to ensure that findings translate into real-world impact. “We are not doing our jobs if we’re not thinking about how we can use limited public resources to the greatest effect.”
Ross Tilchin of Results for America shares as a partner of LEO, “The whole mission (of Results for America) is to help state and local leaders identify strategies that have good evidence of being effective—and then produce material that helps them actually implement those strategies.” Evidence alone is not enough. It needs translation; it needs action.
And in categories like child welfare, public-private partnerships are essential. At the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Rita Soronen has seen how scaling impact requires
alignment between mission-driven organizations and public systems. “We would never have the capacity to serve the number of children we do simply with private funds,” she explains. “Taking it to scale really takes a public-private partnership.”
For several of LEO’s partners, their journeys are nearing the next phase. Replication is no longer a distant goal; it is an immediate opportunity. If evidence itself is a milestone, replication is where the rubber meets the road.
For Casey and the Padua team, it represents the fulfillment of a longheld vision. “To advocate for change nationwide, that’s what replication is all about,” she says. “Replication is really hard work,” she continues. It isn’t about adding a new location; it’s more nuanced than that. Will this work somewhere else, with different people, under different conditions?
For Padua, that time is now. After years of partnership with LEO, replication sites are launching in South Bend and Chicago. “We know that Padua works in Fort Worth, Texas,” Casey explains. “We now want to know where and how else it can work in other communities serving other populations.” It’s a big deal for both LEO and Padua, balanced by a tension that the future depends on adapting that success without losing what made it effective.
That tension is echoed across LEO’s partners. At NPower, Mitchell emphasizes the importance of scaling with integrity. “We want to continue to deliver those same levels of support…in ways that allow us to serve more people but also continue to deliver the same level of quality.” The challenge for all partner agencies is not just to grow but to identify the “special sauce” and ensure it survives the transition from a local program to a scalable model.
Replication is no longer a distant goal; it is an immediate opportunity. If evidence itself is a milestone, replication is where the rubber meets the road.
And for LEO itself, it marks a transition—from evaluating what works to helping ensure it works everywhere it can. As Tilchin notes, the ultimate goal is to accelerate the adoption of proven solutions. But that acceleration is only possible because of the groundwork laid along the journey. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, Padua and many other partner programs have been around for decade(s).
As LEO and several of its partner agencies step into this next phase, one with an emphasis on replication and national expansion, they do so not at the beginning of their journeys but well into their paths. They do so from a place of strength—good ideas that have been validated, vetted, and proven ready to be tested on a grander scale. Ideas that have been exposed to pushback and barriers but have workshopped ways to improve with some of the brightest minds around the table. Collectively, LEO and its partner agencies hold hope that in scaling what works, they too can change the course of the future for the better. They too can look around and see evidence of better work to end poverty everywhere they go.