Improving Community Outcomes

Experience the Event

Presented by

Thursday, March 13, 2025 3:00 pm

Listen in to a conversation among researchers, practitioners, and community partners on how they engaged in deep learning from the unexpected results of a multi-year randomized controlled trial study on preventing homelessness.

Hosted by King County (Seattle, WA) & The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at Notre Dame, Evidence Matters is a series of virtual events designed to engage and inspire community partners, researchers, and policymakers as they work together tackling the biggest issues those in poverty face.

Featured Speakers:

• Carrie Cihak, King County Evidence & Impact Officer
• Kimberly Dodds, Homelessness Prevention Program Manager, King County
• Vincent Quan, Co-Executive Director, J-PAL
• David Phillips, Research Professor of Economics, Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities
• Tanya Robertson, Program Coordinator, Youth and Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative

Partner with LEO

The Evidence Matters series is sponsored on ThinkND by the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO). Poverty is stubborn and requires the utmost collaboration of thought and action to drive change. People of goodwill must bring their unique strengths and positions together to solve this problem. At LEO, we believe knowledge has to be combined with action. But poverty can’t be solved by just one person, or even one sector. That’s why we bring together innovative social service provider partners, top-tier academics, philanthropists, policymakers, and others to tackle poverty.

Change is possible. And with your action, we can get one step closer to reducing poverty in our country, together. 

Your job is to act. What will you do?

For more information, please visit LEO’s website.

Meet the Speaker: Carrie Cihak

Carrie S. Cihak is the King County Evidence & Impact Officer. In this role, Carrie develops external partnerships that expand research and evaluation capacity to help county agencies advance equity and augment the positive impact of King County’s work. Carrie also develops partnerships to highlight successful practices and lessons that may be of value to other departments and jurisdictions.

Carrie has worked at King County for more than 20 years. Before joining DES, Carrie built research partnerships and evidence-building practices at King County Metro. Other positions included serving as Executive Constantine’s Policy Director and working on the County Council’s central staff. 

Before joining King County, Carrie worked for The White House Council of Economic Advisers, taught economics at The College of William & Mary, and worked in the public education system in Japan. Carrie has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in economics from Boston University.

Outside of work, Carrie is happiest when making pie, knits, new friends, and good trouble. Carrie and partner, George, live in central Seattle with three cats adopted from Regional Animal Services of King County.

Meet the Speaker: Kimberly Dodds

Kimberly Dodds serves as the Homelessness Prevention Program Manager for King County, Washington.

Meet the Speaker: Vincent Quan

Vincent Quan is co-executive director of J-PAL North America. Together with Laura Feeney, his co-executive director, Vincent leads the office’s efforts to reduce poverty by ensuring policy is informed by rigorous evidence in the North America region. Vincent provides strategic direction to the policy and training teams and oversees partnership development and outreach for the office. He works closely with policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and donors to promote evidence generation and increase the use of evidence in policy making.

Prior to his role as co-executive director, Vincent led the policy team at J-PAL North America. He has extensive experience translating the results from randomized evaluations into action, promoting a culture of evidence-informed policy across the region. Vincent oversaw J-PAL North America’s efforts to cultivate lasting relationships with partners across the evidence-based policymaking ecosystem, including government policymakers, philanthropic leaders, and nonprofit heads. He also launched multiple new initiatives, including the Education Technology and Opportunity Initiative and the Covid-19 Recovery and Resilience Initiative, to generate important studies to identify effective solutions to address poverty. Under Vincent’s leadership, research catalyzed by J-PAL North America directly informed policy across all levels of government, including federal recommendations and state policies on education.

Before joining J-PAL, Vincent worked at the Prison Law Office, where he conducted research to improve conditions of confinement in prisons across California, and at the Legal Aid Society in New York City, where he assisted low-income residents in navigating the criminal court system. He holds a master’s in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BA in history from UC Berkeley.

Meet the Faculty: David Phillips

As research faculty, David Phillips is a professor who conducts LEO research full-time. He collaborates with service providers to measure the differences their services make in the lives of their clients and in the fight against poverty. For each project, David leads the academic side of the partnership and helps design the research evaluation, implement it, and analyze the data. He received his BA in Economics and Mathematics from Butler University and his PhD in Economics from Georgetown University. David specializes in housing, criminal justice, transportation, and low-wage labor market research.

Meet the Speaker: Tanya Robertson

Tanya Robertson serves at the program coordinator for the Youth and Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative of King County, Washington.

Nurturing the Null: Leveraging unexpected null results to improve case management for housing services

Null results—when a study does not find significant impacts on chosen outcomes—can provide valuable insights for research and policies alike. However, it can be difficult for stakeholders to identify and leverage these insights. In J-PAL’s null results blog series, we highlight randomized evaluations that yielded null results in order to elevate their lessons learned and inform future research. In this piece, Kimberly Dodds, homeless prevention program manager in King County, Washington, discusses her experience discovering that their program had null results and how they were used to improve the Youth Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative.

Read more in this article about how J-PAL is working to support King County’s Youth Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative.