Letters of Interest Sought for Low-Cost Randomized Control Trials

The Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion is join­ing the Lau­ra and John Arnold Foun­da­tion in sup­port of its expand­ed invest­ment in iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and sup­port of low-cost ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als (RCTs) to build evi­dence of pro­grams that improve the lives of chil­dren and families.

The Foun­da­tion has been a part­ner with the Arnold Foun­da­tion since 2013, fund­ing sev­er­al rounds of a low-cost RCT com­pe­ti­tion. For 2016, the Arnold Foun­da­tion has sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased its invest­ment for low-cost RCTs, and has released a new Request for Pro­pos­als.

The Casey Foundation’s Evi­dence-Based Prac­tice Group pro­motes child well-being by invest­ing in the devel­op­ment and use of rig­or­ous­ly eval­u­at­ed pro­grams that help kids reach crit­i­cal mile­stones on the path to adult­hood. Well-con­duct­ed RCTs pro­duce high­ly cred­i­ble evi­dence about the effec­tive­ness of pro­grams, prac­tices and oth­er inter­ven­tions — yet, tra­di­tion­al­ly, RCTs can be quite expen­sive. But the cost of these tri­als can be reduced through strate­gic use of exist­ing, reli­able data, as win­ners of the low-cost RCT com­pe­ti­tion have demon­strat­ed.

Effec­tive low-cost RCTs con­tribute to key Casey Foun­da­tion pri­or­i­ties, includ­ing pro­mo­tion of evi­dence-based prac­tices and the use of cost-effec­tive, sus­tain­able data resources, such as inte­grat­ed data sys­tems, to sup­port research and evaluation.

Let­ters of inter­est for the lat­est round of the com­pe­ti­tion are due to the Arnold Foun­da­tion by March 1, 2016.