FOUNDERS’ LETTER
T
his has been a productive year for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) and our team. We significantly expanded our work on evidencebased policy, extended our efforts in criminal justice, made highly strategic investments in education, and advanced important initiatives in various other areas, including healthcare and research integrity. From LJAF’s inception, we have adhered to a single process for achieving transformative change, regardless of issue area: We study problems in great detail by surveying existing data and research, seek advice from leading experts, develop proposed solutions, rigorously test programs and interventions, and scale those that are proven to be effective. As a young foundation, we are still at the early stages of this trajectory, but we have made great headway in 2015. Our Research Integrity team helped lead the effort to develop new guidelines for research transparency that have been endorsed by more than 500 scientific journals and organizations. Our Sustainable Public Finance team supported initiatives to improve retirement security for workers in several states. In education, we worked to advance the portfolio model of school governance, as more cities embrace this structure to address systemic inequities and improve student achievement. In criminal justice, we have increased the presence and impact of our Public Safety Assessment (PSA) tool while continuing to evaluate its efficacy. And in healthcare, we invested in efforts that are making it easier for doctors, insurance companies, and individuals to obtain objective information about how well pharmaceutical drugs work and for which patients. In the coming year, we will continue to pursue our methodical approach to problem solving so that innovative ideas can be tested, proven, and widely adopted. In some areas, leaders have already expressed interest in interventions such as our PSA tool and the Pay for Success financing model. Our challenge is to promote the adoption of these tools while, at the same time, maintaining fealty to the very important concepts of rigor and evidence. Other areas will require investments in the development of an evidence base. Such is the case with our work in research integrity, where we fund replication studies to ensure that foundational knowledge is accurate and reliable, and in evidence-based policy, where we evaluate promising social programs to identify those that deliver significant results. In addition, we will explore new areas where we see opportunities to apply our strategy for improving social good. This includes our recent investments to increase transparency and fight government corruption. We plan to build on our commitment to furthering evidence-based practices across multiple disciplines in 2016, with the ultimate goal of fixing broken systems and producing measurable, lasting improvements in people’s lives.
Laura and John Arnold
LJAF • ACHIEVING CHANGE THROUGH THE POWER OF EVIDENCE | 3