From research to policy: how one good idea can influence state law

In this workshop, we aim to teach social work scholars how to influence policy makers and policy making through research, collaboration, and marketing of your great ideas. We will use “lessons learned” from a rapid response, mixed methods project that was used the basis for a California legislative bill (SB 439) that aimed to set age 12 as the minimum for child involvement in delinquency court. In this workshop, we will highlight the origins of the idea, how we built an interdisciplinary team across the UC system, involved community advocacy partners, and raised money to support the project. We will also showcase how the idea became a bill that passed through the state senate (and stalled in the assembly) and how we managed to publish both scholarly works and applied policy briefs from the data collection. We will extract “lessons learned” in negotiating the academic/policy bridge as scholars who want social work research to
have a broad impact.