Q&A with Jim Sullivan of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunity
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A lab at the University of Notre Dame wants the conversation on how to solve poverty to hinge on research—and it’s effort is about to broaden.
Jim Sullivan, Ph.D., co-founded and directs the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, a research hub with a focus on answering questions with data that ultimately leads to tangible impact.
The university announced in January that the economics professor will also lead its new Poverty Initiative, which seeks to reduce homelessness and poverty with increased research, expanded curriculum and communal programs.
Sullivan was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Social Impact Partnerships and serves on the National Poverty Research Center Advisory Board. Previously, he researched the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs; consumption, saving, and borrowing behavior of poor households; and poverty and inequality measurement.
Sullivan spoke with Inside INdiana Business about LEO’s change-making mission, its policy and community impact, and what’s next with the new investment.
What is the mission and purpose of the Lab for Economic Opportunities?
Ultimately, the goal of the Lab for Economic Opportunities, or LEO, is to generate evidence that allows service providers to be more effective at improving outcomes for vulnerable populations. We do that by building partnerships with these service providers, many of whom are really eager to get better information on the impact of their work but don’t have the resources or capacity to do so. The real innovation of LEO was to identify that there was this real want in the nonprofit service provider sector to get greater evidence on the impact of their work, and there was interest in the research community to provide that evidence.
Oftentimes, when people think about economic development, people think about luxury and expensive projects. However, LEO focuses a lot of average consumer consumption, poverty and inequalities. Can you talk about the importance of dedicated space for this type of research and conversation?
I think the social sciences have a really important role to play in making the world a better place. Notre Dame has really committed to making that part of its mission. The Notre Dame mission statement is that we have a disciplined sensibility to the poverty, injustice and oppression that burdens the lives of so many. The role that social scientists can play is really using their skills to help articulate, by providing evidence, the impact of anti-poverty programs. That is a real innovation. We see data and evidence informing so many sectors in society. We use randomized controlled trials to determine what drugs should be brought to market. Businesses are doing AB testing all the time. Why shouldn’t we also bring that evidence to the anti-poverty space so that we can allocate scarce resources in a way that improves outcomes?
Can you talk about some of the research LEO works on?
Goodwill Industries runs a program called the Excel Centers. They are credentialed high school programs for adults who have aged out of the normal high school process. That means that these adults who never got a high school degree, now have an opportunity to do so, where in most cases, they wouldn’t. The only option they would have would be to take a GED exam, a high school equivalency test that research has shown is not equivalent to a high school degree by any means. What Goodwill Excel Centers have recognized is that those that never graduated high school face many challenges to getting a living wage in the labor market, having stable employment, etc. It’s not as simple as just saying, “Okay, now you can go to high school.” Many of them have child care challenges that make it hard. Many of them already have jobs. Many of them have mental health or substance abuse issues [or] a criminal justice record that prevents them from getting a job. All of these challenges make it hard to attend and persist and complete their high school curriculum. The Excel centers provide a model that accommodates that. It’s a flexible curriculum. It provides a coach and mentor to help them it gives them access to services and access to childcare, and ultimately, they get a high school degree.
They’ve been around for a number of years in Indiana. We worked with them to get data on earnings and employment for those that graduated from the Excel program as well as those that applied to the program but didn’t graduate. We track their earnings over time. What we show is that, even five years after graduation, those that completed the Excel Center program, got that high school degree, have earnings that are 40% higher than those that did not. That’s a very positive story in terms of the impact of the program.
What I like about this example is the impact that it’s had. We shared that information with the governor’s office here in Indiana, Gov. Holcomb, and that led to an allocation of $50 million to allow Excel Centers to expand throughout the state of Indiana. Now, Goodwill is committed to helping the disadvantaged here in Indiana but also elsewhere in the country. Many states have laws that prohibit public funding for adult high school degrees. You can’t get a high school degree as an adult. We shared the evidence with the Arizona state legislature which led to a change in laws so that Excel Centers can operate there. We’re seeing the evidence that we generate is directly leading to policy change and ultimately impact, which is improving lives for these populations.
Often, policy conservations are happening without research to back to potential solutions. Can you speak to what research brings to such conversation and the reality of them without such?
When there’s no evidence, we tend to turn to anecdotes, right? So there are stories that people tell. Those stories are great and critically important, but they are not sufficient for determining how we should actually be spending our resources. What you want to do is arm public policymakers and funders, like foundations, as well as service providers with the information they need to make the best decisions. The and the best decisions are the decisions that will ultimately make their programs effective or not.
There’s been a bit of a sea change in the way resources are allocated. It used to be that a service provider with a compelling story could get a lot of resources. Now, the expectation is that they need to demonstrate the impact that they’re having. That’s an expectation more so than ever from the funding community. So, the service providers that are able to bring evidence, like, “Look, here’s a story of how our program has taken a family that was homeless and now is stably housed.” And now, let’s couple that with, “And here’s the evidence when we look at the program more broadly that it’s not just doing it for that one family. It’s actually making an impact, and we’re getting a strong return on our investment.” Those entities that are that are bringing both the stories and the evidence to the table, it’s a much more compelling story, and therefore are much more successful at getting the resources they need to scale up their impact.
A lot of LEO research and materials nod toward a call to action, a desire to use this research for real world improvement. Can you talk about that aspect and your lab’s lean toward real world solutions?
There are so many potential projects out there, and so one way to think about your question is how do we choose what we study? We always start with impact—that if the evidence were to show that this program truly moved the needle on a key outcome, would that have the potential for broadening? Can this intervention scale? Will it actually make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable? And if the answer is that, then we ask will evidence really have the potential to play a key role in that? For example, there are policymakers that are interested in knowing what the evidence is on the impact of that program. Then, we think, does this program have evidence of promise? Does the preliminary data suggest that this program really has the potential to move the needle? And if all those things are in place, that really determines which projects we work on. We want to work on research projects that are going to have a real impact in the world. There’s all sorts of uninteresting questions we could answer, but we don’t want to we don’t want to be going there.
How does the lab work with partners to put research into action?
Talking about research can be scary to a service provider at first. In its simplest form, they’re being put under a microscope. We’re saying, “Let’s take what you do, and let’s see whether or not it works.” But a lot of that apprehension is due to kind of a bit of a misunderstanding of what the role of research is and the potential impact that it can have. The providers quickly become more comfortable once they realize that the goal of research is to help them do the great work that they do even better. Once you think about it that way, they get much more excited about it.
A separate point that I’ll make about in terms of working with social service providers is that it’s not typical for researchers to work directly with people in the field. That is kind of the exception. But, it is so rewarding to do that because for much of my research career, I worked with large datasets and the individuals in those datasets were just numbers. Now, I go to these social service providers, and I hear the stories. I interact with the people that they’re interacting with. I see the difference that they’re making. It gives me just such hope that there are such passionate and committed people who will devote their lives to improving outcomes for these populations.
When it comes to poverty, a lot of times people shrug that it’s such large problem that it’s difficult to get a handle on, control and minimize. Can you talk about how your research aims to do those things?
Poverty is very complicated, and one of the first important takeaways from recognizing that is that there’s not going to be a simple solution. That we’re not going to solve poverty with a single intervention. Every story of somebody who’s living in poverty is a bit different from the next. What our research is showing is, to really address the complexities of poverty, you need to kind of meet people where they’re at. For example, for some people, it might be that better skills that are more marketable in the labor market so they can get a higher wage and a more stable job is exactly what that person needs. But, that kind of intervention is not going to be very helpful if the barriers to getting out of poverty are substance abuse, or an abusive spouse or a sick child. Understanding the complexities that get a family into poverty in the first place is really critically important for being able to address the overall issue of poverty.
It is discouraging that poverty is so pervasive, but I’m very hopeful. Particularly when I become more hopeful is when I work with all these wonderful social service providers all across the country who are so passionate about making a difference in the lives of these individuals and families. What I see is that we’re making progress. It’s never going to be fast enough, but we are making progress. Given where we’re at in terms of the role of evidence, where rarely does rigorous evidence play a role in terms of informing how we allocate resources, that gives me even more hope, because as we bring more evidence to bear on effective programs, we’re only going to be more more effective at improving these outcomes.
Can you speak about the new Poverty Initiative and its aspirations?
Last September, the university released its strategic framework—its vision for where Notre Dame is headed over the next decade and beyond. Part of that strategic framework was to announce a commitment to several initiatives that align very closely with Notre Dame’s mission that Notre Dame wants to invest heavily in. One of those is the Poverty Initiative that I’m directing. The goal of the Poverty Initiative is to invest in the strong foundation Notre Dame already has in research, student formation and impact in the anti-poverty space to have a much greater impact in the world. How are they going to do this? The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re gonna build off that strong foundation of the work like that of LEO. We now have 100 active or completed projects with nonprofit service providers across the country, but that’s just scratching the surface. The poverty initiative will allow us to have much greater impact all across the country. Notre Dame is also investing in anti-poverty work across the globe, not just here in the United States. The Pulte Institute for Global Development is doing work in developing countries across the globe that is also with the goal of addressing the complexities of poverty.
On top of that, one of Notre Dame’s greatest assets are our undergraduates. As part of the Poverty Initiative, we will create a curriculum and research opportunities and service opportunities for these undergraduates, so that they can be the next leaders in the nonprofit space to be addressing poverty. They’ll have a much greater understanding of the role that evidence can play in anti-poverty work. Or maybe, they’re the future policymakers who are making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources, and they’ll carry with them a much deeper understanding of how evidence can play a really important role there as well.
Ultimately, kind of going back to an earlier question of yours, we want to make sure that the research work that we do that involves in many ways students, that actually has an impact on the world. Part of what the Poverty Initiative will do is invest in efforts to translate our research findings for service providers, for policymakers, so that we can ensure that the evidence we generate is acted on. I gave you the Excel Center example. Having an infrastructure in place so that we can spread this evidence broadly, so that the effective programs have broad impact is a central goal of the poverty initiative.
What is your long-term goal for LEO and this new initiative, community-wise and in academia?
For LEO, a key long-term goal is that having rigorous evidence to inform decisions about anti-poverty programs is not the exception, but the norm. That when providers are thinking, “What should I do to address this critical need in my community,” they turn to evidence about what’s effective to address those needs. That policymakers when thinking “What policies should I support to improve these populations,” the obvious first answer is, “Well, what does the evidence say?” With the growing expansion of access to data, and work like that of LEO, I’m very encouraged that evidence is playing an increasingly more important role. It’s really creating a culture of evidence in the anti-poverty spaces is a long-term goal of LEO’s.
More broadly, with the poverty initiative, we really want Notre Dame to be known as the premier place to be doing research on anti-poverty programs, the place for students to go to gain a much greater, deeper understanding about the complexities of poverty, and the place that policymakers want to turn when they want to know which policies are effective. That’s an ambitious goal. But, the university has demonstrated a really strong commitment as part of the strategic framework to this poverty initiative, and so, I’m optimistic that we will meet our goal.