Bringing Experts Together

Bringing Experts Together

Katherine O’Regan, Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research. The National Research Council’s 2008 report on research capacity at HUD specifically noted the insular nature of the Office of Policy Development and Research’s (PD&R’s) process for setting its research agenda. In 2011, PD&R responded by soliciting feedback from its many stakeholders, including many Edge readers, to shape its latest research agenda. Through 50 listening sessions in Washington, DC, and throughout the country, and the collection of more than 1,000 comments and suggestions, PD&R engaged these stakeholders in a process unprecedented in its scope. Among the many positive outcomes of this process was a renewed appreciation for HUD’s role as a convener. By gathering so many informed stakeholders in one place, these listening sessions facilitated knowledge sharing much more broadly. Building from this experience, this year PD&R began sponsoring “expert convenings,” a timely and flexible means of bringing experts to HUD for knowledge sharing that discourages insularity. They are proving a success.

Shortly after my confirmation as Assistant Secretary, I attended my first expert convening — a gathering of previous PD&R leaders, including nine former Assistant and Deputy Assistant Secretaries — to discuss PD&R’s plans to produce a volume marking HUD’s 50th anniversary. For more than 6 months PD&R staff had worked on a proposed outline with distinct themes and chapters, and they had secured some tentative authors. This conversation, however, had been almost entirely within PD&R, and it was the leaders of this effort that organized this convening. Perhaps not surprisingly, after a quite lively discussion (after all, we had nine former Assistant and Deputy Assistant secretaries from PD&R!), we had completely rethought the structure and focus of the volume. Thanks to the input from these leaders, by the end of the session we had a very exciting format and focus that all agree expands and improves on our original ideas. This collaborative effort is a perfect example of how PD&R’s work can be more useful by making our process more porous.

With housing finance reform still an active issue on the national agenda, PD&R held another expert convening to discuss loan limit policy for government-backed home mortgage lending. This session offered experts, researchers, and practitioners from within and outside federal agencies the opportunity to talk concretely about one policy issue that helps define the role of the federal government in the home mortgage market: loan limits. The goal of the meeting was to identify some areas of agreement, pinpoint the issues for which no consensus exists, and identify questions that researchers should address. One of the most useful aspects of this session was encouraging participants to return to first principles — what goals are we trying to accomplish through such loan limits, and how might these goals shape the form loan limits take in the future?

Our most recent expert convening, held in the second week of June 2014, focused on the troubling report recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and discussed in The Edge that found negative outcomes for boys who participated in the Moving to Opportunity demonstration program. We invited experts whose work could shed light on these gender-based differences to speak to PD&R and HUD staff from various program offices. We framed the discussion around three questions: whether their work and that of others suggests that the negative findings are valid, (my take from the discussion is yes, there is considerable other work suggesting boys may be more sensitive to particular features of and changes in their environments); what factors might be causing these results, (my summary is there are numerous potential mechanisms suggested by related research, but it remains a bit of a black box in the MTO work); and what new policy and research priorities these findings might suggest (here, there was no closure). This fascinating session advanced HUD’s understanding of the recent MTO findings.

These expert convenings varied greatly in form and focus. The first convening, which solicited direct feedback on a proposed publication from a highly informed group, most closely mirrored PD&R’s initial goals in research roadmap sessions. The second convening intentionally focused on a timely gathering of participants from numerous agencies to share knowledge on a concrete and critical policy question. The third convening focused on educating HUD and PD&R on an important recent research finding, widening the conversations we have had internally. In her testimony to Congress in 2013, Marge Turner made a compelling argument that we need a portfolio of tools for incorporating evidence into the policymaking process. At HUD, these expert convenings are among our most flexible vehicles for incorporating knowledge sharing into our policy and research discussions.