From the grassroots to the Capitol: Can the Possibility Lab harness people power in California?

For the lab and Executive Director Amy E. Lerman, it was an important diplomatic event — and a moment of high symbolic importance. After launching less than four years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lab has won extended reach and influence that’s remarkable in the often-staid world of policy programs.

The semester was over and the morning was still, but high above the UC Berkeley campus, the prestigious University Club was buzzing with energy. Top state policymakers and community leaders, along with philanthropists, high-ranking news editors and others had arrived for a summit convened by the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab to strategize on closing the gap between Californians and their government. 

Its formula for impact? Expertise on the issues and practical knowledge of how government works, plus a nonpartisan network of partners that reaches from the farm fields of Southern California to the streets of Oakland, and from the walls of California prisons to the halls of the state Capitol. In a span of just a few years, allies say, the Possibility Lab has emerged as a sort of connective tissue linking the grassroots to top policy spheres.

It is an unconventional role for a university-based policy program, and many seasoned California policy experts say they’ve never seen anything like it.

Don Howard, president and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation, spoke at the May 29 Berkeley summit, and later said that the lab has emerged into “a unique and increasingly essential role” in California.

“They bring together the people most affected by policy decisions and those responsible for implementing the decisions,” Howard said. “It’s a bridge that is needed now more than ever.”

Today, at any given time, the lab is managing 15 or 20 projects in a broad range of fields: food and water; crime and criminal justice; artificial intelligence; education; health; housing; childcare and eldercare; youth empowerment; race and equality; clean energy; and climate change. 

The lab rarely advocates specific policy reforms, but instead seeks to gather and amplify the insights of people affected by different challenges, and then to make sure that policymakers can hear and understand those insights. This sort of civic engagement is its primary mission, and the lab’s team — a unique mix of researchers and practitioners — is helping design civic engagement activities that are directly informing public policy at the highest levels.

But the next challenge may be its biggest: After striking partnerships with the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, it will try to persuade the gubernatorial campaigns of Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra of the value of engaging the public in policymaking.

“As a public university, this should be the norm,” Lerman said. “We should be in these conversations. The idea that we are serving the people of California — this is in our DNA.”

An early connection with corrections officers

The Possibility Lab is affiliated with Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science. It launched in 2022, but much earlier, when Lerman was a UC Berkeley graduate student in the early 2000s, she was interested in how diverse perspectives could help solve policy problems.

She had been working with incarcerated students in the college program at San Quentin State Prison and realized she also needed to understand the experiences of correctional staff. So she connected with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, and in that relationship she was developing the values and orientation that would shape her lab.

An alliance between conservative correctional officers and a young Berkeley scholar might seem unexpected. But Stephen A. Walker, the director of correctional health for the officers union, recalls that there was a generational change underway among its ranks, and the leadership needed insight into its younger members.

“We reached out to Amy, and we asked if she would be interested in helping us figure out what our members’ priorities were in contract bargaining,” Walker explained. “Surprisingly, but unsurprisingly, she jumped at the chance to help us measure this from a scientific perspective.”

Some years later, union leaders were blindsided by the suicide of a corrections officer many of them knew well. Their desire to understand the pressures that could damage the physical and mental health of officers led to a study by Lerman and her colleagues. The findings: Exposure to traumatic events inside the prison walls left them vulnerable to depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts.

Since its founding, the Possibility Lab has continued to work with the union and the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, recognizing that harsh conditions impact both prisoners and officers.

“Officers overwhelmingly, even still today, believe that those walls literally are silos,” Walker said. “They keep their voices silent, they keep their interests and concerns trapped behind those walls.

“I would be willing to debate anyone on this: Amy Lerman and the Possibility Lab have advanced this profession and opened it up. They’ve catapulted those concerns and those fears out into the public, where they can be part of the same conversation about how conditions affect the incarcerated.”

Data and deep listening 

In California, and in most states, there’s a standard model for policy organizations and university research initiatives — and the Possibility Lab breaks those molds. 

It is not a consulting firm. It’s not an advocacy group. It is not aligned with left or right, or with urban or rural interests. It produces data-rich reports and studies on state issues, but it expends much of its energy in organizing communities, listening to people and bringing people and policymakers together.

In some of its most ambitious early projects, the Possibility Lab focused on farmworkers in the Inland Empire of Southern California, and on low-wage workers across the state, through the California Workplace Outreach Project. To understand the deep dynamics of farmworker health, the staff worked not only with farmworkers, but with the state and local agencies that serve them, farmers who employ them, and with community organizations, legal clinics and others who support them.

These projects relied on deep listening. For example, one involved a dozen focus groups and town halls, bringing together over 200 field, warehouse and service workers. From those conversations, the lab researchers developed over 1,500 health indicators. Those were grouped into 15 categories, ranging from access to medical care and health insurance to environmental practices, education and spiritual health. 

Consistently, the farmworkers told the lab team that their physical and mental health is closely tied to economic security. According to the project’s report, that’s the sort of insight that’s essential to good health policy.

A similar approach was taken in projects that assessed how residents thought about safety in high-crime areas of Oakland and how cities respond to behavioral health emergencies. Local government, first responders and community nonprofits were included in these efforts, along with hundreds of local residents.

The Possibility Lab calls it “people-centered policymaking,” and Lerman defined it in a recent talk. “I’m a political scientist by training, and I’ve been thinking about how distant we have become from government,” she explained. “We think of the government as this set of professionals and institutions that is really separate from everyday people.

“Occasionally we vote them in or out, but we don’t think of ourselves as part of the apparatus of government. … Really, the goal is to think creatively about how we bridge that gap between government and community.”

No headlines, but high impact 

When a program’s top priority is to build bridges between communities and government, impact can be difficult to measure. Its work doesn’t usually result in completely new laws — but often it changes how programs and policies are implemented on the ground.

Lerman said the low-wage worker project helped inspire the state’s new Rural Strategic Engagement Plan, which recognizes that farmworkers are essential to California’s economy and provides several million dollars annually to make state resources and services more responsive and accessible to agricultural communities. That’s being implemented by the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and the Agriculture Labor Relations Board, with the Possibility Lab in a key partnership role.

In other cases, the lab’s influence is profound, even though the full impact might be years away. 

After Newsom established the Youth Empowerment Commission, the lab was enlisted as an expert partner almost from the start. Lab staff worked with commission leaders to gather data, network with local youth commissions and develop a strategic plan. 

When Newsom established California’s first Racial Equity Commission, the Possibility Lab again was involved in the earliest stages, helping to shape an effort that would strengthen the pursuit of racial equity in every state department and agency. 

The lab is helping to develop and implement “a practical framework for how departments and agencies can assess their own strengths and gaps on racial equity, how they can think about measuring it over time — really, how they think about improving racial equity,” Lerman explained. “It’s a toolkit and a map for how they can go about doing that work systematically, and effectively, in budgeting, hiring and program delivery.” 

In a land of wealth, pervasive scarcity

In 2024, the lab worked with the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies on a poll to understand Californians’ access to basic necessities. The results were striking: 71% of voters struggled to find affordable housing. Sixty percent said eldercare was a challenge, while 57% reported difficulty in finding childcare. Nearly half said they couldn’t find low-cost, healthy food or good local jobs. 

More broadly, the lab was interested in answering why, in a state endowed with incredible wealth, so many people struggle to meet their basic needs. That question aligned the lab with the national abundance movement, and became the basis for a project called the Abundance Accelerator.

In a time of political polarization and economic insecurity, Lerman says, the abundance idea asks for everyone to examine how their ideology, though well-intentioned, may contribute to scarcity. To promote housing construction, for example, liberals have to be willing to ease government regulation, while conservatives should accept government’s role in solving the problem.

Libby Schaaf served two terms as Oakland’s mayor, and before she was named president and CEO of the Bay Area Council last April, she was closely involved in California’s abundance movement. Her work has often intersected with the Possibility Lab.

“I think California is in a critical moment, and democracy is in a critical moment,” Schaaf said. “What I appreciate about … the work that the Possibility Lab is doing and the way that they’re doing it is that they’re not choosing a side. They’re trying to lean in seriously to the questions about the utility of governmental policy and process, but with a clear-eyed commitment to the democratic and social values of ending suffering and poverty and inequality.”

Street cred — and high-level cred, too

This extensive work, across so many issues and regions of the state, has helped the Possibility Lab to create a remarkable corps of partners. Still, what the lab has done has no recent precedent: an academic research unit, taking an organizing role, and building partnerships not just with community organizations but with the news media, philanthropists and at all levels of local and state government.

Last September, the lab launched a partnership with CalMatters, the influential Sacramento-based news publication that’s focused on California policy and politics. The agreement created the Knowledge Hub, a website in the CalMatters domain that publishes academic research into state policy issues. The Possibility Lab produced the initial papers, but CalMatters CEO Neil Chase says the hub will open to other researchers in the months ahead.

To call the partnership innovative is an understatement — it’s almost unheard of for a serious news journal to partner with an academic policy program and to publish its research. But Chase, in an interview, described it as updated community journalism, a throwback to days when small-town papers would publish school lunch menus or big-city newspapers would provide a rich travel section.

The Knowledge Hub, he explained, was “an opportunity for us to build a site where you could have vetted, high-quality content that is relevant to the world we cover, which is California policy and politics … even if it doesn’t rise to the level where we would write a story about it.

“And,” he added, “I think it’s our role to use the levers of journalism to improve the operation of democracy and the way policy happens.”

At about the same time last year, the lab was assembling a list of case studies illustrating effective civic engagement projects. Newsom’s administration had made civic engagement a priority, and lab staff put together a working group of state leaders who helped gather recommendations on where innovations were happening.

The result: “State of Engagement,” a robust collection of case studies, produced by the Possibility Lab with extensive contributions from the highest levels of the governor’s office. And from that process emerged a plan for a new “State of Engagement” fellowship, a network of fellows hosted by UC Berkeley that now extends across state government.

Maricela Rodriguez, who holds a cabinet-level post as Newsom’s senior adviser for civic engagement and social innovation, recognized the lab’s rare expertise in government process and community engagement.

“Their ability to see the bigger picture, their ability to connect the dots — that was very exciting to me,” Rodriguez said. 

“We were able to bring together state staff involved in civic engagement and build connections for ongoing efforts,” she added. “As a result, we didn’t produce a report that would just sit on a shelf. We engaged staff, shared best practices and opened it up for new ideas — which resulted in a new fellowship program. The Possibility Lab was able to quickly put that into practice.”

‘The public interest and the greater good’

On the morning of the May summit, that sense of hope, of possibility, was tangible in the crowded hall at the University Club. Chancellor Rich Lyons told the audience that Berkeley was the natural place for such an event.

The summit “brings together people from different sectors, people with different areas of interest and expertise, and with different perspectives and beliefs,” Lyons said. “It is, we believe, the best way to take on the most complex and impactful challenges and opportunities, particularly those that are inextricably connected to the public interest and the greater good.”

Having accomplished so much in such a short time, Lerman and the lab team are working to scale up their work. At the summit, the lab introduced its first group of 17 “State of Engagement Fellows,” all mid- to senior-level state government leaders who oversee civic engagement, participatory policymaking and community outreach in their departments and agencies. 

This fall, the lab will be releasing the Civic Engagement Agenda for California’s Next Governor, a blueprint for the state to enhance inclusive decision-making, reduce harmful polarization and improve public trust.

With the election in less than four months and Newsom leaving office in January, Lerman and her colleagues are hoping to engage the two gubernatorial candidates — Becerra, a Democrat, and Hilton, a Republican — on the importance of civic engagement in a critical moment for California.

“When we approach the campaigns,” Lerman said, “we’re not saying, ‘Here’s the expertise we can bring you.’ We’re asking them, ‘How can we help you to do what you’re trying to do, which is to serve the people of California?’

“I’m optimistic that we can be a part of that conversation.”