My three-hour shift manning the LEO office’s front desk was a refreshing slice of calm in my day. Far from the cacophony of chatting voices
echoing through Duncan Student Center and the winding lines of South Dining Hall, the “LEO Pod” was peaceful, with researchers filtering in for their morning coffee or a meeting. For three hours, everything slowed down, a break from that go-go-go, “efficiency-is-everything” feeling that can pervade campus.
That front desk offered me a front-row seat to LEO’s mission as I absorbed glimpses of projects through coffee refills and conversations. Since I study Economics and Political Science, I started connecting the research jargon in the LEO Pod with my problem sets and papers, and felt pulled to learn more.
The Poverty Research Fellows program provided a chance to swap my chair in the LEO Pod for a seat beside Arik Zintel, one of LEO’s research design managers. He manages LEO’s work with the Right at Home (RAH) initiative, an effort to replicate Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program in 10 diverse sites across the country. From Atlanta to Alaska, Right at Home provides fast, flexible financial assistance and supportive services to households at imminent risk of losing housing. LEO works with sites to develop a rigorous evaluation method and develop targeted screening to direct limited resources to where they’ll have the greatest impact.
When I began my summer as Arik’s intern, his work ethic and attention to detail were immediately apparent. Each of the 10 sites has its own unique stakeholders and contexts. I found myself frequently toggling to our master RAH spreadsheet in meetings to keep track of site-specific agenda items—but Arik has internalized them all, mentally switching from site to site within seconds. I began to see a critical challenge of his work: each program must maintain fidelity to core components of Santa Clara’s model, while also being adapted to the needs of that given community.
That adaptation piece, or adjusting targeted prevention to a local context, takes up the bulk of research design conversations. In weekly research design calls for each site, Arik, LEO researchers, and local providers wrestle with a central question: what systems can we build to ensure RAH dollars reach the folks most likely to become homeless?
Over the first few weeks of my internship, these tough, hour-long conversations sometimes felt grueling, even inefficient. I wondered how Arik stayed so energized, driving each site’s discussion towards the next problem to solve. Were these calls, logistics, and adjustments really worth it, and how did Arik stay motivated through them all? Why was the site-specific adaptation component that important?
As the summer began, I decided to read Pope Leo XIV’s hot-off-the-press encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Its second chapter addresses and reframes key pillars of Catholic Social Teaching in this technology-driven age, and as I read, I reevaluated my attitude towards that day’s Zoom calls. The principle of subsidiarity asserts that social tasks should be completed by the most local level capable of providing them. Pope Leo writes that such “processes [must] not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner, but instead be directed toward
the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation” (Magnifica Humanitas, no. 71).
I diagnosed my initial impatience as a subconscious byproduct of our optimization-obsessed culture. It would certainly be faster to bypass weekly research-design conversations, but homelessness prevention is not one-size-fits-all. What initially appeared inefficient was actually deliberate. For me, I began to see the benefits of LEO’s comprehensive attention to local context as twofold.
First, it strengthens a program’s potential impact. For example, in the case of Right at Home, one of its core components is targeted prevention, or the use of a data-driven assessment tool in determining client eligibility. If certain characteristics indicate a greater risk of housing loss in a particular community, the tool can prioritize those households, making it more likely that limited financial support
reaches people who would otherwise become homeless. The development of such a tool takes time and analysis, and, by nature, looks different from site to site.
Perhaps more importantly, taking time with each RAH site’s team builds relationships and affirms dignity—not just for the folks being served, but also for the providers that serve them. Time spent with sites implicitly reasserts LEO’s mission: there isn’t a tradeoff between research and social work; instead, they are intimately codependent. Quantitative analysis needs qualitative understanding. As Pope Leo’s encyclical reminds us, true human connection must not be lost amidst exponential technological advancement.
As students, we often assume that effectiveness decreases as the time required increases. The faster, the better. Let’s get our lunches on the move, “Grab-N’-Go” style; maintain jam-packed Google Calendar schedules, and multitask to the max. But perhaps true innovation lies in reclaiming a measure of inefficiency for the sake of authentic connection.
While I’ve moved from administrative assistance to research support, for me, LEO has remained an oasis from the relentless speed of our culture. This summer, I witnessed how each extra minute on Zoom strengthened the researcher-provider relationships on which effective social programs depend.
That is what sets LEO apart: a stubborn dedication to human dignity, no matter how much time it takes.