When Denisha Porter was in junior high, municipal funding priorities almost stole her future. Her school was due to lose its science lab, where she worked with a teacher who was also her mentor. “I was so crushed,” Porter remembered. She wrote down what the lab meant to her and took her story to a Board of Education meeting.
“I didn’t realize it at 11 or 12, but that was budget policy change,” Porter told an audience at the George Washington University last week. It was her first taste of the way personal storytelling can affect real-world change, an advocacy approach she now brings to her position as executive director of community nonprofit coalition All-In Cincinnati.
Porter shared her story as part of the closing panel at “Only@GW: Research to Action for Economic Mobility, Health and Well-Being,” a daylong summit relaunching the George Washington University’s Institute for Socioeconomic Opportunity (ISEO), formerly the Equity Institute, spotlighting its achievements and charting a course forward.
“Our work is about connecting scholars, policymakers and communities to co-create solutions that close the nation’s wealth gap, our health gap and our well-being gap and expand opportunity for all,” ISEO Director Wendy Ellis, an assistant professor of global health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and director of the Center for Community Resilience (CCR), said in a video introducing the panel. “We’re dedicated to training the next generation of scholars and systems to address some of society's most pressing challenges.”
Founded in 2021 by GW Law School Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew and her “kitchen cabinet” of GW scholars from multiple schools, ISEO is designed with interdisciplinary collaboration and systemic change at its heart. The institute is structured around four interconnected research hubs—habitat, education, justice and democracy—but these issues are understood to be anything but siloed. All-In Cincinnati is one of multiple community organizations in D.C. and nationwide to partner with the institute, integrating on-the-ground, community-driven research and advocacy with the resources and knowledge base available to GW as an academic institution.
ISEO’s “heart,” Ellis said, is its policy lab, which “shapes questions, guides research and crafts recommendations that lead to real world change.” By convening experts, building connections within and beyond GW, funding action-driven scholarship and channeling all that work into actionable policy, ISEO “is dedicated to creating actual knowledge and developing leaders…committed to eradicating inequality across the U.S. and around the globe.”
At the evening discussion last Thursday, Porter and Ellis joined fellow panelists Erin Saul, executive director of GreenLight Cincinnati, and Amita Vyas, interim director and professor of prevention and community health and director of the GW Maternal and Child Health Center of Excellence at Milken Institute SPH. The wide-ranging conversation was moderated by national Comcast Newsmakers host Tetiana Anderson, a partner at Starfield Media.
Like Porter, Vyas has seen firsthand the power of data-driven storytelling. She has worked since its earliest days with Girl Rising, a girls’ education nonprofit that works to reinforce the value of educating girls and loosen the grip of disempowering attitudes among children of all genders—attitudes she said often go unacknowledged or even unnoticed, including in the communities where they do the most damage.
“When you ask people directly, ‘Do you think girls should be educated? Do you think adolescent girls should have all of the same resources and opportunities that adolescent boys have?’ Everybody says yes,” Vyas said. But the data says something different: that millions of girls are missing from schools, with far-reaching social and economic costs.
Still, there are ways to make change, and storytelling is one of the most powerful. Vyas recalls visits to rural communities in the Indian states of Bihar and Rajasthan, places where “girls never play sports.” She and her team convened local leaders for a screening of Girl Rising’s self-titled documentary, followed by a community-led discussion.
“A few weeks later, there was a huge cricket game on the field with girls and boys playing together,” Vyas remembered. “We didn't have to share research with them; I didn't tell them ‘What you're doing was wrong, and this is what you should do.’ The stories spoke for themselves.”
Like Vyas, Saul identified a crucial step toward narrowing outcome gaps: mutual trust, built by direct engagement with and attention to affected communities. GreenLight works to remove barriers to prosperity for Cincinnati community members, developing philanthropic approaches and other strategies to head off evictions, minimize debt and encourage entrepreneurship. Research is crucial to these initiatives, Saul said, but it’s often either literally or implicitly paywalled from the people who might be able to translate it into action, as she saw while working at a hospital earlier in her career.
“None of the social workers on the ground are saying ‘Let me check [academic journals] for what emerging best practices are this year,’” Saul said. “They don't have time for that. They're serving 40-something clients in three days and having to do their case notes. So that's where I think academia has to reach out and make it applicable, make it feel friendly, and it has to be relational.”
In that arena, Saul said, Ellis and ISEO stand out. “Wendy's in churches with us in Cincinnati talking to local pastors; she's showing up in ways that traditional academic institutions have not shown up before. That's built that trust over the years, and [now] it's accelerating impact.”
That approach isn’t convenient or paternalistic, but mutually beneficial, Ellis said. It allows experts with a range of strengths and backgrounds to experience proven successful models for advancing justice, which then may be replicated in another city or for another population.
“We wanted to create a framework where we're actually embedding our community partners in academia,” Ellis said. “We talk about building the bridge between community and research—well, we should be working side by side.”
As a result of Saul’s partnership with ISEO and CCR, Saul is pursuing support to implement the Opportunity Dashboard, a digital tool developed by Ellis and CCR Associate Director of Research Daniel Chen. The dashboard is an outgrowth of their research in demonstrating both economic and social return on investments aimed at closing critical health and wealth gaps over time. The duo raised private equity to support development of the digital tool and, in agreement with GW, will be able to deploy this innovation in future research at CCR and ISEO.
The panel discussion also announced the official announcement of the All-In and ISEO partnership. All-In Cincinnati’s team are now officially part of the ISEO team, joining to create a national model of researchers working side by side with community organizations to translate research to action in communities across the U.S, including in D.C.
Ellis said she hopes that ISEO itself will prove to be a replicable model that can be taken up at other schools and in other contexts.
“What if we actually are able to disseminate this idea of leadership that helps to move people to socioeconomic opportunity?” Ellis asked rhetorically, addressing the students in the audience. People who want to continue that tradition of leadership “don't have to sit in the GW classroom, but they can be part of this work that we're doing side by side with them and then go on and do the work in their own community.”
