Second Year of Low-Cost RCT Competition Launched

The Coali­tion for Evi­dence-Based Pol­i­cy has launched the sec­ond year of its three-year com­pe­ti­tion to select and fund promis­ing low-cost ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als (RCTs) designed to build evi­dence about what works in U.S. social spend­ing. The ini­tia­tive, fund­ed in part by the Foun­da­tion, is designed to demon­strate the fea­si­bil­i­ty and val­ue of low-cost RCTs to a wide pol­i­cy and phil­an­thropic audi­ence. The low-cost RCT com­pe­ti­tion con­tributes to key Foun­da­tion pri­or­i­ties, includ­ing pro­mo­tion of evi­dence-based prac­tices, and the use of cost-effec­tive, sus­tain­able data resources to sup­port research and evaluation.

Foun­da­tion fund­ing is used to pri­or­i­tize out­reach to researchers of col­or and to encour­age the use of inte­grat­ed data sys­tems that com­bine data from mul­ti­ple pub­lic agen­cies to pro­duce com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion on indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties. The Foundation’s Ilene Berman par­tic­i­pat­ed in a con­fer­ence host­ed by the White House Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Pol­i­cy and the Coali­tion to hear from the win­ners and final­ists of last year’s com­pe­ti­tion about the ben­e­fits and oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ed by low-cost RCTs.

Infor­ma­tion on the new round of the com­pe­ti­tion, includ­ing the appli­ca­tion pack­et, can be found at the com­pe­ti­tion webpage