In 2025, the U.S. government began implementing drastic cuts in research. We hear a lot about the impact on public health, but they also cut funding for public safety. Research teams, including those of us at the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center (JohnJayREC), are facing resource shortages. Our core team is still here, and we are available to help with data analytics, evaluations, and research dissemination. We just need to revise our activities and priorities to include more short-term and low-cost research projects focused on community safety. We can help organizations in the greater New York City area or anywhere in the U.S. if your project can be conducted remotely with no original data collection.
Shifting Activities
Before these disruptions began in January 2025, we focused on projects with budgets of $100,000 or more. This allowed us to allocate resources effectively and work on just a few projects at a time. We must be more flexible now. If your organization provides services to justice-involved clients or works with communities to improve public safety, we can help you generate evidence of impact and effectiveness — even if the funding is modest.
We would be pleased to consider projects with varying budget levels. For example:
- $5,000 to $15,000 — If you need a policy-focused, research-based analysis that would not require new data analysis.
- $15,000 to $30,000 — If you have data already cleaned and organized in spreadsheets or structured files, and you need help with analysis.
- $30,000 to $50,000 — If you have analyzable data records and need assistance developing a strategy for structuring them to answer relevant and researchable questions.
- $50,000 to $100,000 — If you know of potentially useful administrative data, and are willing to guide our efforts to obtain new downloaded data files, before we analyze the results and use them to prepare a report for you.
These are just some of our ideas. We would be happy to consider yours as well. Regardless of funding level, we would design a project to answer key questions and publish the results in a respectable and professionally designed report bearing the John Jay College brand.
JohnJayREC has been part of John Jay College for more than 40 years. It is one of the most prominent research centers at the College. In the past 15 years alone, we conducted more than 30 projects with combined budgets of $48 Million. We have partnered with federal, state, and local governments, as well as philanthropies and foundations. Our philosophy of research and evaluation is consistent with our Evidence Generation initiative.
Feel free to contact us. Let’s come up with some ideas.
