How to Convene a Network of People Who Can Actually Create Change

Public policy in the United States is at an inflection point. Existing policy is too dated or inadequate to address America’s problems of widening inequality, social injustice, and recovery from COVID-19. Policymaking is often disconnected from the very communities it is meant to serve, and can be slow to respond. Expertise is frequently siloed and fails to address intersecting problems of public trust, health equity, justice, and political economy that are central to a thriving society. Local leaders—from mayors to county and public health officials, school district, public security, and local business officials—are searching for guidance to implement national policy so that it adequately meets the needs of their communities.

At a time of rapid social and economic change in America, we need a fresh approach to policymaking on national issues that is attuned to the needs and realities of our communities. New America, through a partnership with the Harvard Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and Brown University School of Public Health, offers an integrative policy-making model with the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative (JHD). The JHD model connects national-level policy bodies and experts with local leaders and practitioners on core policy challenges facing communities across the country. It takes a multidisciplinary approach and focuses on being responsive to local issues, with rapid cycles of research, policy implementation, and locally driven innovation. In effect, the JHD model is designing effective policy supports for local implementation and national scale.

The integrative policy-making model works. Over the course of several months in early 2020, and again in 2021, a network of nationally recognized multidisciplinary experts, mayors, and other local leaders led an effort to craft responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result was clear, accessible guidance for local leaders on how to target and suppress COVID-19 in their localities, including in congregate settings such as schools and prisons, to keep them safe for in-person gathering.  

Through the process of running an integrative model for COVID-19 response for multidisciplinary leaders, JHD has taken away some key lessons for others interested in holding similar convenings:

1. Understand the problem you are trying to solve from the perspectives of those at the national, state, and local levels. Officials at different levels of government all work for the American people, but use different frameworks to think about a problem and how to address it. National policy experts and academics take a macro approach to addressing a problem with policy solutions, while local officials are more concerned with technical needs or considerations to implement that policy within their communities. Understanding those perspectives allows for an approach that addresses the national problem but with policy supports or tools designed for implementation by local leaders.
2. Bring practitioners and local leaders into the design and research process. Policy and academic experts have incredible knowledge that can support the public interest. But that knowledge and research is more powerful and impactful when it is shaped by the needs of affected communities. Critically, the presence and advocacy of practitioners and local leaders—those that put policy into practice on the ground, such as mayors, county officials, and public health and safety officials—can refocus experts when it comes to policy timelines and pressing needs. Under the JHD initiative, experts changed deadlines from months to weeks to address pressing concerns; discovered new problems through early warnings by practitioners; and refocused the framing of their policy supports to apply to municipal, county, and district contexts, while still addressing national or state-level need. The JHD model’s 2020 work on COVID-19 response saw experts produce policy supports and data tools that could be tailored to any locality’s characteristics and experience with the disease. The model worked so well that educators, union representatives, and local public health officials used it in a 2021 project for school-based staff taking on infection prevention and control duties.
3. Create policy support deliverables for practical use. It’s time to throw out the 20-page research papers and academic approaches and replace them with bulleted briefs and succinct language. Local leaders and practitioners need clear, accessible policy guidance designed for their use and responsive to local needs. Experts must prioritize policy roadmaps, technical advisory manuals, data tools, performance gauges, and communication guides to help local leaders implement policy with optimal impact. Importantly, designing policy for local leader use also means that experts must converge their policy advice, something the JHD model has done several times. The model’s 2020 work, for example, converged public health advice, metrics, and key performance indicators for the COVID-19 response, providing much needed clarity to public health officials and the public. Before, experts and academics were using different metrics and models to measure COVID-19 spread and remediation efforts, including tracing and supported isolation practices.  
4. Disseminate policy support deliverables widely, including through national bodies and practitioner networks. Once you have examined the policy problem from different perspectives, brought practitioners and local leaders into the policy support design and research process, and created policy tools for local leader use, your attention should turn to making sure those tools are used. Identify and engage relevant government bodies, national level associations, and practitioner networks early on in the process. Offer to pre-brief them on the research work and, where applicable, invite them join the research work. That way, the research is both enriched by their perspectives and, once a policy support is ready, they could be asked to share that policy through their networks, perhaps even by holding a webinar for members in their network.

Bringing together experts with practitioners and local leaders in a collaborative research model results in policy supports and tools that more effectively meet the needs of communities. From public health to criminal justice reform, the JHD has seen the benefits of these models across different fields and found, using the lessons above, that collaborative research models present a key avenue for addressing issues of inequality and injustice within society, and directly serving those often left behind.

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