The Greenwall Foundation launched its Bridging Bioethics Research & Policymaking (BBRP) initiative in 2022 to help advance our strategic priority to increase bioethics’ impact on policymaking. Bioethics should be at the table when policy decisions are being made. To that end, the BBRP initiative does not fund bioethics research but, rather, supports those who are taking the next steps to translate research results into policy. How this translation happens, though, is open-ended and the BBRP initiative encourages creativity.
The diversity of BBRP grantees’ approaches provides an opportunity for the Foundation to learn about what works—and what doesn’t—when seeking to impact policy. We want to share lessons from their efforts with the field more broadly so that others interested in translating bioethics research results into policymaking can learn from their experiences. In June, we held a webinar with the first three BBRP grantees that explored their approaches in depth; you can watch that webinar in full here.
Today, we are introducing a new feature on our website: a Question-and-Answer (Q&A) section with each BBRP grantee that explores the lessons learned from their projects. Starting today, you can browse the Q&As with investigators from the inaugural 2022 round of BBRP grants. Q&As with other BBRP grantees will be posted as their projects close.
We asked each BBRP grantee the following questions:
- Who was the intended audience for your project?
- What message did you seek to deliver and how?
- How did you involve collaborators outside of bioethics research in your project?
- What lessons did you learn about translating bioethics research to policymaking?
In response, we heard insights such as, “We learned how to tailor the content and method of information delivery for different audiences…. [A] slide-deck discussion tool could be more useful for policymakers and easier to share than an issue brief,” and “Communication is key. Collaborating with communications experts taught our team how to make their work directly useful to policymakers.”
You can read these three Q&As starting today:
- Housing America’s aging society: a bioethics standpoint for policy development – Nancy Berlinger, PhD, The Hastings Center
- Policies to improve assessment of inherited cancer risk – Robert Cook-Deegan, MD, Arizona State University
- Disseminating vaccine information and increasing equity during the 2023 Texas state legislative session – Kirstin Matthews, PhD, William Marsh Rice University
Keep an eye on our BBRP grant pages for updates.