The Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s (LJAF) Evidence-Based Policy Initiative

The LJAF Evidence-Based Policy initiative focuses its grantmaking efforts on the key goal of building the body of social interventions backed by strong, replicated evidence of sizable effects on important life outcomes. We recognize the challenges in identifying truly-effective interventions, and therefore invest strategically in evaluation studies so as to optimize chances of success. Specifically, we seek to fund rigorous evaluations – mainly randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – of interventions backed by highly-promising prior evidence, suggesting they could produce sizable impacts on outcomes of recognized policy importance, such as educational achievement, workforce earnings, criminal arrests, hospitalizations, child maltreatment, and government spending. As an illustrative example, we are funding a large, multi-site RCT of Bottom Line – a program that provides one-on-one guidance to help low-income, first-generation students get into and graduate from college. This study is measuring college enrollment, persistence, and completion outcomes for a sample of about 2,400 students over a seven-year period. Early impact findings are promising (e.g., at the two-year follow-up, a 10 percentage point increase in continuous college enrollment over freshman-sophomore year, versus the control group).