County Employees Head to MIT for Evaluating Social Programs Course

Five County employees are heading off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology next week to take part in a course on “Evaluating Social Programs” from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

The five employees include: Rebeca Appel, a program manager of policy and data with the Office of Sustainability and Environmental Justice; Ariel Hamburger, planning manager with Planning & Development Services’ sustainability planning division; Carol Manisouk, epidemiologist with HHSA’s behavioral health services; Johanna Avelar Portillo, principal data & research analyst with the Office of Evaluation, Performance and Analytics (OEPA); and Sienna Rodriguez, epidemiologist with HHSA’s behavioral health services.

All five successfully applied to attend the course and were awarded financial support covering tuition and travel.

The weeklong course opportunity continues a relationship that started last year between the poverty action lab, also known as J-PAL, and OEPA.

OEPA was chosen in November to team up with J-PAL, for the poverty action lab to provide technical assistance to help evaluate a County pilot program that pays low-income seniors to keep them from homelessness, the Shallow Rental Subsidy program.

The County created OEPA in 2021 to use modern analytics to study the County’s vast collection of data in new ways; to look for patterns, trends and associations that can help leaders improve programs, services and policies.

That particularly includes top priorities including homelessness, mental health, equity and racial justice.

The course that the five County employees will take through J-PAL at MIT next week will focus on randomized evaluations.

Randomized studies not only measure and compare the results for people who receive the benefits of a program, they also measure and compare them against similar groups of people who don’t receive the benefits.

The weeklong course will take an in-depth look and when and how randomized evaluations can be used to thoroughly measure impacts; how they should be designed and used; and how their findings can improve policies.

Ricardo Basurto-Dávila, the head of OEPA, said randomized evaluations of programs could give the County more confidence that the results of their assessments reflect the actual impacts of programs.