Investing in groundbreaking research and evaluation methods to advance America’s bridge-building movement
Any successful social impact movement must be able to ascertain that its methods and outcomes are scientifically sound. Civic Health Project is deeply committed to evaluating – and helping our academic, practitioner, and philanthropic partners to evaluate – what bridge-building approaches are likely to yield the best outcomes, and what they are actually achieving when deployed at significant scale.
We’ve invested in groundbreaking research by prominent scholars, to evaluate the effectiveness of various approaches to bridging America’s political and social divisions. And we’ve worked alongside the bridge-building ecosystem to develop an academically vetted platform that practitioners can deploy to assess the impact of simple interventions as well as complex, multi-faceted bridge-building programs.
Spotlight Solution: Strengthening Democracy Challenge
The Strengthening Democracy Challenge brought academics, practitioners, and industry experts together in a collective effort to identify effective interventions to improve Americans’ commitment to democratic principles of political engagement. With contributors’ help, the Challenge team identified promising, short interventions and scientifically evaluated them in one of the largest randomized experiments in the social sciences. While some existing interventions are in-person, time-intensive, and involve repeated exposure, the Challenge team focused on short, scalable interventions that have the potential to reach millions of people.
Spotlight Solution: Social Cohesion Impact Measurement (SCIM) Platform
In the face of rising political division, hundreds of organizations in the US are actively working to counter toxic polarization by bridging Americans across divides. Although many of these “bridge building” groups have developed measurement and evaluation systems of their own, others may benefit from access to a free, flexible, tested, and easy-to-use assessment platform to measure the impact of their work. Recognizing this, Civic Health Project and the Goals & Measures Working Group of the Bridging Movement Alignment Council (BMAC) developed this Social Cohesion Impact Measurement (SCIM) framework. SCIM is a survey that you can give to participants before and after your event or program in order to assess the impact of your engagement on their attitudes related to different dimensions of social cohesion.
Civic Health Project has also awarded these catalytic grants:
To generate rigorous, social science-based perspectives on which bridge-building approaches are the most effective, and to measure their outcomes when deployed in the real world, Civic Health Project has awarded catalytic research funding to these prominent scholars:
Dr. David Broockman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Stewart Coles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Nick Rogers is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Linda Tropp is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Faculty Associate in the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Dr. Nathan Walter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Dr. Robb Willer is a Professor of Sociology, Psychology and Organizational Behavior and the Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University.
