Six questions with Yale for Connecticut Director Sam Quinney
Quinney has decades of experience working within and alongside governments to build evidence for policy
Across the country, cities and states interested in using data and evidence to inform policy face a range of challenges. From overcoming resource constraints to combining data fragmented across agencies, integrating research and resident voices into fast-moving policy processes is a complex undertaking that requires persistence and creativity.
At the Tobin Center, we’re committed to sharing findings from existing research with policymakers, but also to working alongside state and local leaders to understand their challenges and help them build the evidence they need to serve constituents.
Nowhere is this commitment deeper than in Yale’s home state of Connecticut. Through the Yale for Connecticut initiative, the Tobin Center works alongside the state of Connecticut to help study and solve their urgent policy questions.
Welcoming Sam Quinney as Director of Yale for Connecticut
The Tobin Center is excited to announce that Sam Quinney has joined the center to lead the Yale for Connecticut initiative and expand its impact. Sam joins Yale from The Lab @ DC – an organization housed inside the Washington, D.C. mayor’s office. There, he spearheaded more than 50 research and data projects over 10 years to improve public services and created new processes for evidence-informed budgeting.
In his new role at Yale, Quinney will oversee a variety of programs including the Connecticut Governor’s Fellowship and other collaborations with Connecticut agencies. He’ll also work alongside and support Yale faculty conducting cutting-edge, collaborative research with state partners. All of his efforts will be aimed at increasing capacity for human-centered and evidence-based policymaking across Connecticut state government.
Prior to joining The Lab @ DC, Quinney conducted research for the U.S. Department of Education and White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. He also worked for the City of Chicago, where he helped design a more cost-effective use of commercial loading zones and a 311 data tool used to predict outbreaks of rodent activity.
Experts from Connecticut government and Yale faculty will be instrumental in shaping the emerging Yale for Connecticut initiative. As Quinney learns more about collaborations to-date and future goals, we asked him to tell us more about his own past experience and what he hopes to contribute through his new role in Connecticut.
Q: What drew you to the Tobin Center and the Yale for Connecticut initiative?
A: Helping to build and lead The Lab @ DC was the joy of my professional life to date. I was able to try and test many of the things that were on my personal wish list of policy ideas, from testing low-income public transit to surmounting benefits cliffs to testing income-base fines for traffic tickets. After a decade in The Lab and DC government, I felt ready to try some new things and take some bigger swings at systemic changes for disadvantaged residents, and the Tobin Center is the best place I’ve seen to do that. It’s a team that takes on ambitious efforts, but is, at the same time, very focused on how to pragmatically get there.
I have spent my entire career to-date in government, and I am a big believer that the path to achieving our goals and restoring trust in government is by increasing state and local capacity to positively impact their residents. What appealed to me about the Yale for Connecticut Initiative was that, while it was based in a university, at its core it is an investment in building government capacity through the Governor’s Fellowship program and in partnerships with students and faculty.
As I got to know the faculty more, I was also very impressed by the partnerships that the Tobin Center faculty had already built with Connecticut’s Department of Social Services and New Haven Public Schools. I could tell that they were top notch researchers, but more importantly were doing research for the right reasons – to improve lives both locally and nationally.
Q: You were the founding deputy director–and first staff member–of the Lab @ DC, which is recognized as one of the most successful evidence-based policy teams operating inside a state government. Tell us about a project or accomplishment you’re particularly proud of.
A: Some evidence-based policy labs have a particular focus area, which is great but can also be limiting. In The Lab @ DC, our focus was on building the capacity within the DC government to design and test its most innovative ideas, regardless of policy area. Too often there are government leaders who want to build and use evidence, but they are afforded neither the time nor the in-house capacity to do so. The Lab @ DC provided that capacity for leaders in the DC government who wanted to use it.
The team spent many years working to convince people that you can successfully pilot new programs and use the results to inform decisions, so, ironically, one of my proudest accomplishments came without me or the team doing any convincing at all.
In 2023, Mayor Bowser decided to substantially increase the number of traffic cameras on DC streets as part of DC’s effort to reduce deadly car crashes. So, when they wanted to test out ways to lower the potential financial impacts the tickets from those cameras would have on low-income residents, they did a typical government thing and created a cross-agency taskforce to make recommendations. But, they also did something less typical and set aside a $2 million budget for a pilot program with the explicit expectation that The Lab @ DC would stand up and evaluate the pilot. I knew about none of this before getting an email about an appointment to the taskforce. In government, there’s a lot of surprises that land in your inbox, but this was the absolute best type of surprise. It was a proud moment because evidence-building was becoming a part of the muscle memory of the DC government. The pilot that eventually developed is just wrapping up now.
Q: Building evidence is hard! What are some under-appreciated challenges state and local governments have to navigate?
A: It is – that’s why it’s so important to have people within government and at partner universities whose specific job is to help state and local governments build and use evidence. One thing that is underappreciated is that you can’t separate the process of evaluating programs from the existing functions of government. So when a government agency is starting a new program or reforming an existing one, there is a laundry list of things they need to do, not only to start the program, but to comply with all of the rules that govern their work. They also need to be responsive to the residents that expect results and the political pressures that need to be accounted for.
All of that is challenging to begin with and it takes truly talented individuals and teams in agencies to successfully implement a new program. Once that’s done, then people – agency heads, elected officials, voters – want to know “well, did it work? Did the new program actually help people?” They may not say it by name, but what they are asking for is the results of a rigorous evaluation. But, it’s almost impossible to do that if you don’t add in the evaluation considerations to that already long laundry list the agency has for a new program at the start – things like what data are we going to collect on program participants? Do we have permission to use their data for evaluation? Who are we going to compare their outcomes to know that they are actually succeeding?
So, even if the agency wants to build evidence and their constituents expect evidence, it takes a lot of work to pull it off. But, with the right staff members and partners, like at the Tobin Center, it is not only possible to deliver, it gets easier and easier each time you try.
Q: How do you approach building partnerships with state agencies?
A: I learned early on that it has to be about true partnership – where I, or my team, are trying to help the agency accomplish something that was already a goal or priority for them; something they wanted to do but hadn’t had the chance or something they have to do for one reason or another.
At the same time, we have our own goals at the Tobin Center to help make government more human-centered, effective, and efficient – and 9 times out of 10 those are complementary to the agency's goals. By understanding what the agency’s priorities and pressures are, I then try to find if I have anything to offer that would help them meet their goals and to not waste their time if I don’t. In The Lab @ DC, that might have been to help engage their clients in new ways, to improve user experience, or to analyze complicated data they had on-hand. But most frequently, it was that over many years and successful pilots we had developed a roadmap for starting projects and how to navigate that laundry list of issues that can hamper progress. So we could help point out the obstacles, but importantly we could work side-by-side with agency partners to navigate them.
At the Tobin Center, I won’t be directly in government, so part of my early months have been devoted to finding the different ways that Tobin staff, faculty, and students might support the Connecticut government. It will look different no doubt, but I expect it to be very much aligned with the same philosophy of finding shared priorities that will improve lives. And there are already great examples to build from, for example the long-term partnership Professors John Eric Humphries, Chris Nielson, and Seth Zimmerman built with New Haven Public Schools that yielded groundbreaking findings on the benefits of universal pre-K, as well as the work Professors Chima Ndumele and Jacob Wallace are doing with Connecticut’s Department of Social Services.
Q: Before your research career, you taught middle school history in Philadelphia and worked as a coordinator for a college readiness program serving low-income students. What, if anything, did that teach you about challenges in designing or delivering public programs based on evidence?
A: Educators are really remarkable in so many ways, and serving as one was a formative experience to start my career. I think there are about 2% of teachers that are just naturals at engaging with kids and guiding their learning, but for the other 98% it is about being organized and creating systems in the classroom. As an educator, I was definitely in that 98% and, as my family could tell you, I am not a naturally organized person. I had to learn how to set up systems that worked for my students, worked for me, and allowed us to accomplish as many of our goals as possible.
It also helped me get used to failure as a part of life and professional growth. As a teacher, you have a lesson plan and classroom procedures, but they are delivered through hundreds of interactions with students throughout the day and there’s no way you’re going to get them all right, especially as a newer teacher. So it was failing in those small, and sometimes larger, ways that taught me how to both reconcile with those failures and learn from them to become a better teacher over time.
Those two aspects of being an educator have heavily influenced my career. Whether it’s in research or elsewhere, I am always trying to organize my work and my teams around effective systems and to not be afraid of failing, as long as those failures lead to longer term success.
Q: What’s one thing you’re most excited about as you get started at Yale and in Connecticut?
A: Oh gosh, it’s that I’m such a nerd and generally curious about all kinds of things and want to understand how the world works. The only time I’ve ever spent at a university is as a student, so, beyond my day-to-day work, I am just really excited about all the avenues of research and learning that are happening at Yale.
I probably spend way too much time reading Yale’s daily newsletter, from the mobility patterns of traveling circuses to discoveries about flagella on the cholera virus, it’s just so energizing to be at place where there are so many people trying to better understand the world and make it a better place in their own ways.