Public Policy

The goal of our work is to influence and move social change so

that opportunities for all, social justice, and environmental sustainability become realities.  We leverage our Theory of Change and evaluation work to develop lessons and recommendations for changes in public education, youth programs, public health, environmental issues, housing policy and more.

ActKnowledge and the Center for Human Environments awarded a policy evaluation grant by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation! 

   A joint ActKnowledge-Center for Human Environments team headed by Andrea Anderson-Hamilton has been awarded a two-year grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, beginning April 2009, to evaluate the Foundation’s Tobacco Policy Change (TPC) program. The TPC program combines advocacy, communications, and community collaborations to engender policy change and programming in support of effective tobacco prevention and cessation at state, regional, local and tribal levels, with particular emphasis on vulnerable populations. TPC seeks to demonstrate convincing evidence of which advocacy strategies work, in which contexts and why, to further the cause of tobacco prevention and control policy. The evaluation will focus on outcomes of the efforts across multiple sites, also on the effectiveness of coalitions in influencing tobacco policy.

    ActKnowledge will create a Theory of Change for the Tobacco Policy Change Program as the framework for learning and evaluation across the entire scope of the project. The Theory of Change will reflect insights from existing models of tobacco advocacy, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s experiences with tobacco policy advocacy, and the empirical findings from evaluations of other tobacco policy change efforts. The Theory of Change will model key policy change pathways, stakeholder assumptions about the political and social contexts necessary to policy change, the organizational outcomes coalitions need to successfully influence tobacco policy, and the resources needed to produce the desired outcomes.

The evaluation research seeks to answer:

• which Tobacco Policy Change program grantees created policy change,
• how and why those groups were able to move the policy needle;
• which environmental factors factored into the success,
• how the Foundation itself—through the structure of the TPC program,
• its technical assistance and program requirements—supported the success of each alliance; and
• whether the composition and capacity of the coalitions themselves had an impact on success.

    A set of cross-site research questions concern which approaches were effective in promoting changes in minority communities, and how the national Tobacco Policy Change Theory of Change was adapted to reflect the particular needs of Native American, African American and Latino communities.
     Research methods will include online surveys, key-informant interviews, archival analysis, and case studies of certain sites. The evaluation promises to inform future funding and program development decisions, provide lessons learned and best practices to the field, and add to the literature on mixed-method advocacy evaluation in public health, specifically tobacco prevention and cessation.

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Other Projects:

NYC Housing Court Study, with the Center for Human Environments

ActKnowledge advised CHE on this 2006 project, which used surveys in its first phase to determine the characteristics of a variety of Tenants in Housing Court who were facing eviction.  Surveys were conducted by the CHE at the City University of New York Graduate Center, on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.  The Brennan Center will use data from this study to evaluate a proposal to the New York City Council regarding the right to counsel for tenants who are senior citizens. Upcoming phases of this project include an in-depth hallway survey, which will focus more specifically on the characteristics of tenants in Housing Court who are 62 or older, as well as a courtroom survey, which will provide a representative sample of tenants in housing court and a better picture of percentages of tenants aged 62 and older.  The results of this survey, while preliminary, can be used to get some understanding of the needs of tenants who go to Housing Court.

Successes of Homeownership Education and Emerging Challenges and
Enhancing the Effectiveness of Homeowner Education, with the Center for Human Environments

ActKnowledge worked with the Center for Human Environments (CHE) in 2004-2005 to disseminate and present the findings of a national, 15-site survey of over 750 low-income and minority households about the impact of non-profit homeownership education provided by NeighborWorks Organizations (NWOs) prior to purchasing a home.  ActKnowledge led the supervision, writing, and editing of individual site reports for each of the 15 sites and assisted in securing funding for ongoing research in 2006.  The 2006 research will consist of focus groups with homeowners and NWO staff at five national sites to gain a more in-depth perspective on ways to enhance the effectiveness of homeownership education and help owners avoid foreclosure.  ActKnowledge will manage a number of aspects of this project, including supervising the planning and design process; conducting focus groups; analysis of video from focus groups; drafting final reports and presentations; and day-to-day supervision of project staff.