Megan Toohey is the Managing Director of Children and Families at the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL), where she leads a team...
Chile’s El Mercurio featured our What Works Cities project in Santiago, where the GPL is advising the city on their landscape maintenance contracts. Read the article here, and read more about results-driven contracting here.
Elena Hoffnagle is the Director of Procurement Research & Development at the Government Performance Lab, where she leads projects to scale procurement...
GPL Program Director Hanna Azemati was a guest speaker at the Innovations in Evidence conference in Regina, Canada from November 15-16, 2018. The event convened international leaders and innovators to share emerging trends, lessons learned, and insights into how to overcome challenges facing policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in advancing and implementing evidence-informed policy making. Select conference speakers, including Hanna, were also invited to provide written recommendations on Canada’s path forward in building the infrastructure to support evidence-...
Nearly 200 people who work with Rhode Island's Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) came together to weigh in on how child welfare services should be purchased. The GPL had been assisting DCYF with implementing active contract management in its contracts with service providers. Read more about the summit here, and...
New Hampshire is redesigning its child and family services system to better keep children safe and with their families, and to enable those families to thrive. The GPL’s technical assistance is focused on expanding and strengthening supports that can keep families together, helping families receive the most appropriate interventions after contact with the system, and building upstream connections to early childhood, family wellbeing, and other prevention services. This work builds the state’s permanent capacity to contract for results, connect...
Massachusetts’ family shelter system has struggled to meet its mandate of quickly re-housing homeless families, with over 40% of families staying in shelter longer than one year. To improve outcomes for this population, the GPL helped Massachusetts better understand the state of the current shelter system by analyzing contract spending and interviewing stakeholders, including shelters providers and families who have used the system, and helped release a Request for...
Chile’s El Mercurio featured our What Works Cities project in Santiago, where the GPL is advising the city on their landscape maintenance contracts. Read the article here, and read more about results-driven contracting here.
“Just referring a family to services isn’t always enough. There need to be more intentional efforts to ensure that the families ultimately get connected with those agencies,” said Trista Piccola, the Director of the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, & Families (DCYF). The GPL worked with DCYF and the Rhode Island Department of Health to create a plan for reducing child fatalities and near-fatalities due to neglect or maltreatment. Read more about our recommendations ...
The GPL is assisting the State of Illinois improve employment outcomes for individuals exiting incarceration by reforming in-facility vocational programming at the Kewanee Life Skills Re-Entry Center. Former Illinois legislator Jim Nowlan writes about his experience attending a Kewanee graduation ceremony and meeting program graduates. ... Read more about The Dispatch & The Rock Island Argus: Offenders trying to break into this prison
In her latest commentary for Governing’s Better, Faster, Cheaper blog, Program Director Hanna Azemati describes the GPL’s work with the city of Louisville, KY to establish a strategic procurement system. According to Louisville’s director of purchasing, this system has helped the city “elevate the importance of procurement, build trust, and earn credibility” by prioritizing, structuring, evaluating, and managing critical contracts more effectively. ...