Elevate the Debate

Acknowledgments

The chapters in this book were developed from a series of workshops that the Urban Institute Communications Department conducted between 2016 and 2019. Workshop participants hailed from diverse fields: housing, international development, social work, labor economics, healthcare, and more. Feedback was unanimously positive, and we were inspired to empower more researchers by putting those lessons in words.

We are indebted to the researchers at the Urban Institute whose dedication to their scholarship and their collaborative spirit has helped make Urban a trusted resource for thought leaders, academics, practitioners, journalists, and policymakers. We also thank our current and former Urban colleagues who supported this project directly: Rob Abare, Fiona Blackshaw, Ben Chartoff, Matt Chingos, Mary Cunningham, Allison Feldman, Dan Fowler, Martha Galvez, Heather Hahn, Rachel Kenney, Arlene Corbin Lewis, Jeffrey Lin, Rhiannon Newman, Sheryl Pardo, Archana Pyati, Brittney Spinner, Jerry Ta, Alex Tilsley, John Wehmann, and Sarita Williams.

We are grateful to the president of the Urban Institute, Sarah Rosen Wartell, for her leadership; for believing in accessible, engaging research; and for providing a vision that inspires us to “elevate the debate” every day.

The most important contribution to this book comes from the authors, all of whom are experts in their fields of communicating research and analysis in different ways across different mediums and platforms. They ...