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Better Government Lab
The Better Government Lab (BGL) – with members based at both Georgetown University and the University of Michigan – focuses on how to improve the delivery of public services. This often involves using new digital innovations. The combination of digital skills and government willingness to innovate unlocks new opportunities. However, a problem remains, which is a lack of credible causal evaluations of these digital innovations. Potential adopters don’t know which innovations work, and under what conditions. As a result, successful digital innovations are undervalued, while limited resources go toward replicating unsuccessful innovations.
The BGL vision is to build a credible digital toolbox of proven solutions to make public services work better, with a particular focus on safety net access. More precisely, BGL generates and disseminates causal evidence on which digital innovations make a difference to people’s experience of government, and access to safety net benefits. In the last three years, the Lab has raised more than $5 million from a variety of sources (the Gates Foundation, Code for America, Schmidt Futures, the WalMart Foundation, and the William Penn Foundation) to enable it to work with government or civic tech organizations with the goal of reducing frictions in the delivery of public services.
Center for Local, State and Urban Policy (CLOSUP)
The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) conducts, supports and fosters applied academic research to inform local, state, and urban policy issues. One of the Center's key programs is the Michigan Public Policy Survey (MPPS), the nation's only ongoing census-style survey of every unit of general purpose local government across an entire state. Across all of its activities, the Center functions as an information resource for policymakers and practitioners, academics, students, the media, and the public.
CLOSUP works to foster effective communication between academic researchers, stakeholders, and the policymakers dealing with today's state, local, and urban policy problems. The center also facilitates student engagement with today’s critical policy issues through its CLOSUP in the Classroom Initiative, integrating Ford School students as policy analysts in the center's research activities, bringing the center's findings into the classroom, and supporting student internships with organizations focused on state and local policy.
