Public Policy

In 2019, the Director of the Child and Family Research Partnership received funding from the Pritzker Children's Initiative to launch the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center. The Center aims to be a resource for state leaders who are interested in implementing evidence-based policies to improve maternal and child health in the earliest years of life, informed by the most rigorous policy research available.

In the summer and fall of 2019, I worked with senior leadership to develop and execute a vision for the structure of the new Center. We co-developed standards of evidence and processes for designating state policies as effective, needing further study, ineffective, or harmful. I was promoted to oversee the Policy Clearinghouse team, a group of researchers conducting reviews of all the available research on state policies that have the potential to move the mark on outcomes for young children and their families. Distilling decades of research into a policy brief, and further into a two-page summary, was a master class in translating complex research findings into insights for a non-technical audience.

Prenatal-to-3 Policy Clearinghouse