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Data-Driven Program Design: How DC and Maryland Built Justice Infrastructure on Evidence
Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center
Most justice programs are designed based on intuition, precedent, or whatever the funder's latest priority happens to be. A need is identified, a grant is written, a program is launched — and the data collection starts after the fact, if it starts at all. The result is a field full of promising pilots that can't prove they work, can't explain why they work, and can't tell you what to change when they don't. This session presents the opposite approach: what happens when data drives every decision from the very beginning.
The DC Resource Bridge and Maryland's ACE-CIS coordinated intake systems were built on evidence at every stage — and this session treats them as methodological case studies, not program showcases. Before building anything, both teams quantified the problem: surveying legal services providers, mapping case acceptance criteria across organizations, and identifying where people were falling through the gaps between programs. Maryland's mapping of 10 programs' acceptance criteria is what produced an 86% successful placement rate — not luck, but a design deliberately built on data about who each provider could actually serve. DC built iterative feedback loops from its pilot, changing the program in real time based on what the numbers showed. The funder perspective adds a dimension practitioners rarely hear: what data did the DC Bar Foundation need to see before investing, how did evaluation findings shape continued funding decisions, and what do funders wish grantees would measure but almost never do? The technology story shows how usage data drove platform evolution — the Justice Passport didn't stay the way it was designed, because the data told the team what users actually needed was different from what the designers assumed.
Participants will then apply the methodology to their own work. A data plan design exercise asks each table to take a program they're building or improving — a new intake system, a navigator program, a court simplification effort, an AI tool — and design a five-stage data strategy modeled on the DC/MD approach: What will you measure before launch? During the pilot? What will tell you whether to scale, modify, or stop? Who is your data partner? How often do you review and adjust? The exercise forces the uncomfortable question most programs avoid: What would the data have to show for you to shut this down? You'll leave with a data-driven program design template, a measurement inventory of what you're tracking and what you're missing, and the DC/MD evaluation documentation as a model for how evidence-based design actually works in practice.

Speakers
AM

Amy Mix

DC Resource Bridge
Amy is the Director of the DC Resource Bridge, a coordinated intake and referral project that streamlines access for District residents to more than 30 legal services providers. Prior to this role, Amy spent nearly two decades as a legal services attorney and led an Elder Justice... Read More →
CD

Catherine DiSarno

DC Resource Bridge
BK

Brienne Kordis

Civil Justice
avatar for Sarah Coffey Bowes

Sarah Coffey Bowes

Executive Director, Civil Justice Inc.
Sarah Coffey Bowes, Esq. is a veteran non-profit manager with a strong background in programmatic growth, sustainability, and strategic planning. Sarah supervised the operation and continuous expansion of the award-winning Maryland Courts Self-Help Centers - a network of legal service... Read More →
Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202
  Research

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