LEO is decidedly nonpartisan.
Our partisanship is toward people experiencing poverty. With that as a guiding principle, we work without a hidden or partisan agenda.
That’s not to say we’re not strategic in how we do our research or that we don’t develop thoughtful research agendas. Rather, it allows us to stay true to our provider partners, who work directly with people experiencing poverty, and go where they lead us. If that means a workforce program that people on the right are particularly interested in, sobeit. Likewise if there is a workforce program that people on the left are championing, sobeit. Our decision to take on a study, to partner with a provider, is based on the value gained by understanding the impact of a program on people’s lives. Period. If the partner is willing to do the work of rigorous evaluation and the program has potential to transform lives, we’re in. Regardless of politics, regardless of ideology.
LEO is decidedly not a for-profit evaluation shop. There’s a political website called Follow the Money (now Open Secrets) that tracks contributions to federal (and some state) campaigns. The idea being that the public has a right to know and perhaps an interest in seeing who’s donating to politicians in order to reveal their motivations—more sinisterly, who “owns” them. Recent changes to campaign finance laws have made it harder to track dollars to electeds, befuddling the aim for transparency. At LEO we take a few hard lines on money and on following research. First, we commit to always publishing/publicly sharing results, REGARDLESS of what a study shows. The challenge of publishing in top peer-reviewed journals is something we take on because we’re committed to the academic pursuit that Notre Dame embodies, but also because we want the validity, credibility and independence that peer-review provides. Second, we do not get paid to play; we are a non-profit research lab and we do not and will not sign off on contracts that require quieting results if they don’t turn out the way the funder wants. Spoken plainly, we will share results regardless of what they are. We are motivated to learn about impactful programs, but also want to know when programs don’t have impact. If a program shows to not have an impact, or even harder, have a negative effect on people, we want to know. And the risk we take on and we ask our partner providers to take on is learning that something does not work. We do this because people experiencing poverty deserve and need programs that actually help them. And providers want to run impactful programs. Not to mention our research allows us to assess cost-effectiveness.
LEO is decidedly rooted in a culture of learning. We partner with talented social service providers to learn alongside them. So that either way—positive, negative or null—we commit to taking what’s learned and making an impact. If a program has a positive impact—AWESOME!—we work to share that with all key stakeholders and, where possible, we work to help get that program scaled and replicated so more people can benefit from it. If a program has null or negative impact—DARN IT!—we work with the provider to learn from this—often leading to program improvement where a provider takes the findings, digs in on staffing, program dosage, and perhaps makes changes; it can also lead to ending a program or redirecting resources to other programs.
LEO’s non-partisan stance, independence and culture of learning indeed allow us to follow the evidence.