One thing I’ve been thinking about this week: Improving the flow of information between practitioners/policymakers and researchers, particularly in the public safety space.

As a PhD student and junior scholar, I spent most of my time hunting for interesting policy changes or programs that I could evaluate. To do this, I read lots of newspaper articles. Without direct connections to anyone working in the real world, that was my only source of information.

As I developed non-academic connections, this task (finding research ideas) felt less challenging, but it still wasn't easy.

Fast forward to my first month at Arnold Ventures, which sits more on the policy/practice side, with a deep non-academic network.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with research opportunities — knowledge of hundreds of cool new interventions cities and states were trying, and frequent requests from policymakers and practitioners for help with impact evaluations.

My first impulse was to make a list of the opportunities we knew of and thought were interesting. We posted that on the AV website, and I heard that many researchers found it helpful.

Our BRIDGE events have tried to connect these siloed networks directly, one topic and small group (12 researchers and 12 practitioners) at a time.

But there's still so much information that my team has that we struggle to share with the research community effectively, especially the PhD students and junior scholars who would have the bandwidth to jump into a new project immediately.

And so, we continue to brainstorm.

My next idea - launching in the coming week - is a Slack workspace for researchers who would like to receive a steady stream of research ideas and requests from the policy/practice community.

It will be broadcast only (only AV staff can post) so we don't need to worry about moderation. To follow up on any specific idea, members of that community would contact us via email. Want to join? Email me at jdoleac@arnoldventures.org and I'll send you an invite link once we go live.