Promoting effective social investments for Puerto Rico’s youth and families
[Invitation Only Event]
This 2.5 day convening for practitioners and funders has the overarching goal of strengthening an already growing movement of evidence-building and use in Puerto Rico to improve outcomes for children, youth and families, with a particular focus on economic mobility, education and child welfare. To achieve this goal, the event will have three intended outcomes, that will be driven by a set of event activities:
Outcome 1: Increasing interest in philanthropic investments in the development and use of evidence in Puerto Rico. This includes increasing interests from local foundations and funders and attracting new investments from national foundations.
Outcome 2: Identifying the challenges and opportunities of building and using evidence in Puerto Rico. This will help inform investment priorities to ensure a more robust and sustainable infrastructure for actionable research and evaluation.
Outcome 3: Promoting collaborations between national and local funders. Ideally these collaborations will eventually lead to the leveraging of resources to implement the identified priorities and a coherent strategy to strengthen the development and use of evidence.
Agenda
Day 1 Site Visits: The first day will be mostly geared towards visiting funders who wish to learn more about Puerto Rico’s context in a firsthand manner through site visits. It is crucial to understand Puerto Rico’s unique socioeconomic context, and some of its social impact leaders, to begin understanding the need for investment on the island, but also how some of the work being done in Puerto Rico can provide important lessons about what can work in other communities with similar characteristics. At the end of the day, there will be an opportunity for local and national funders to connect and learn about each other’s work, values and investments.
Day 2: The second day will delve into developments of evidence-building in Puerto Rico, with a focus on experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations that have taken place or are currently underway, with a focus on the areas of education, economic mobility and child welfare. It will begin by establishing a common language about evidence and the role of philanthropy in building evidence, move to discussing learnings, challenges and opportunities of the efforts of evidence-building in Puerto Rico, and close by bringing fresh perspectives on innovative ways to evaluate that could be adopted in Puerto Rico.
- 9:30am – A Common Language for Defining Evidence: Different Perspectives and Common Themes
- 10:00am – Fireside Chat”- The Role of Philanthropy in Building Evidence
- 11:00pm – Panel: Recent Evidence Building Efforts in Puerto Rico
- 1:30pm – Challenges and Opportunities for Building Evidence in Puerto Rico
- 2:30pm – What are the range of options organizations have to build evidence? From RCT’s to Outcome Measurement
- 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM – Funder’s Debrief
Day 3: While on Day 2 the focus was on building evidence, on this day we will turn to seeing the state of use of evidence by the government of Puerto Rico and discussing the ways in which Puerto Rican nonprofit organizations have been successful at promoting the use of data and evidence to inform public policy design and implementation. This last day of the convening will be capped off with a collaborative debrief and planning session.
- 8:45- 9:15 AM – What we know about the effective use of evidence
- 9:15-10:15 AM – What we know about the use of data and evidence in the government of Puerto Rico
- 10:15-11:15 AM – Successful use of data and evidence to create systemic change in Puerto Rico – learnings and opportunities
- 11:30-1:00 PM – Debrief and Action Plan Session with working Lunch
For those visiting us, here are hotel recommendations:
