What drives us
Inventing science-backed solutions that transform lives
We bring research, AI, and human-centered design to the problems where better data and better systems can improve lives, and we back our recommendations with platforms we have built and proven in the field.
Workforce & Economic Mobility
We help states connect people to careers that raise earnings, and help employers find the skills they need. Our work spans skills-based matching, career pathways for groups too often left out (veterans, people reentering after incarceration, opportunity youth, rural workers, and the long-term unemployed), and systems that align requirements across programs like UI, SNAP E&T, TANF, and WIOA, so people are not left to navigate each one alone.
DOORS, the Data for Opportunity in Occupational Reskilling Solution, is our skills-based talent marketplace, now deployed across multiple states. It uses AI to build a fuller picture of each person's skills and connect them to jobs, training, and career pathways, with dedicated tools for job seekers, employers, and educators. It also gives state leaders a current view of which skills are in demand and which training programs deliver them.
In Arkansas, LAUNCH is the state's instance of DOORS, a talent marketplace that every unemployment claimant uses to search for work. We are now designing its next generation with the state, an AI-enabled talent marketplace grounded in behavioral insights and labor economics.
Education and Opportunity
We help students from under-resourced communities move through the transitions that shape their futures, from high school to college and from credentials to careers. We design behavioral interventions and tools that remove barriers, document and carry verified skills, and keep students on a path to graduation and beyond.
We designed LAUNCH for Students, the part of Arkansas’s talent marketplace that introduces young people in grades 7 through 12 to careers and the skills they require, now reaching about one in three students at those grade levels.
In Rhode Island, our Rhode2College program, and Pathways to College in the Los Angeles Unified School District, raised college enrollment among low-income students.
Benefits access and administration
We make it easier for eligible families to receive the benefits they qualify for, and easier for agencies to deliver them. Our tools let people record an activity once to meet requirements across programs, give claimants more control over their own case, and adapt to each program’s rules without forcing people through separate systems.
When the pandemic hit, RIPL built the system that made Rhode Island the first state in the country to pay pandemic unemployment benefits.
Worker protections and fair pay
We help states enforce labor protections on publicly funded work. Our Certified Payroll Hub replaces manual, paper-based prevailing-wage enforcement with a secure digital system for contractor registration, certified payroll submission, and review. Automated checks surface underpayment, misclassification, and debarred contractors, and a public, FOIA-ready record keeps enforcement transparent.
We designed and built the Wage Hub with the New Jersey Department of Labor to do exactly this. The state owns and operates it.
What powers our work
Secure data infrastructure
Everything above depends on using sensitive government data safely. We pioneered the secure research data lakes and enclaves that let agencies bring siloed data together for analysis without exposing anyone's identity, and we built SIRAD, an open-source framework that removes personal information from administrative data and replaces it with an anonymous identifier, so researchers can link records about a person without ever knowing who that person is. Partners keep full ownership and control of their data, with automated logging and auditing for complete transparency.
Research and evaluation
We hold programs to the standard we use in research. Using randomized and quasi-experimental methods, we measure whether an intervention actually moved the outcome it was meant to, and we report what we find. This is the discipline that lets partners fund what works and increase impact per dollar invested.
Constantly inventing for good
Custom Innovation
When a partner brings a challenge our existing platforms do not fit, we design and build from the ground up, drawing on the same mix of economics, data science, engineering, AI, and human-centered design. The goal is constant: a solution grounded in evidence and built around the outcomes that matter.
