Overview

The State IMPACT (Innovative Models for Policy Acceleration & Collaborative Testing) Collaborative is a new effort to accelerate sustainable evidence-based policy learning and decision-making for states through funding and research capacity support.

The collaborative will build on three unique existing capacities — Coleridge’s data integration and analysis platform, the Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF); MDRC’s experience carrying out high-quality evaluations; and the relationships that MDRC and Coleridge have developed over the years with state agencies. The ADRF currently hosts cross-agency data from 14 states.  

The MDRC and Coleridge collaborative will vastly streamline data acquisition for use by evaluators and enhance the skills of state staff to conduct analyses of their own. Inspired by the success of an earlier initiative, the TANF Data Collaborative, the State IMPACT Collaborative will bring together data providers, state employees, MDRC researchers, and Coleridge data scientists to collaborate on high-quality tests of the effectiveness of new state strategies in education, criminal justice, income support, and employment, using linked sources of government data.  

Ultimately, this initiative has the potential to bridge gaps in the fragmented data infrastructure in these state systems, to foster a culture of experimentation in state agencies, and to build states’ analytic capacity, culminating in a report that demonstrates the benefits to states of moving in this direction.     

Stay tuned for information about the application process scheduled for later this year.