Amy E. Lerman, founder and executive director of the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley.

In dozens of focus groups and meetings across some of Oakland’s most troubled neighborhoods, the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley has looked beyond police patrols and arrest rates to understand how residents themselves think about safety and security.

Amy E. Lerman founded the Possibility Lab as a multidisciplinary team of policy researchers and practitioners who work with government and community partners to develop and test data-driven policy ideas that serve the public good.

“Fundamentally, our idea is that the people who are closest to social problems have a unique expertise that we can tap into in order to solve the problems,” said Lerman, who is also the lab’s executive director. “When we don’t include them in the conversations around how to understand the problems they face, or how to solve those problems, we’re really losing this incredible, rich source of knowledge that comes from their everyday lived experience.”

Read the whole story from the UC Newsroom

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