Laura Larsen, Vice President of Local Practice at Results for America was one of eight people we filmed at the GFOA’s annual conference in Chicago between June 28 and July 1. This is the second in the series that will appear on Thursdays in this space.

Larsen focuses on the variety of way in which Results for America helps “local government leaders think about how they can center evidence in the budget process. What we know is that as a local budget leader, folks are faced with a number of constraints and conflicting demands every single year when folks are putting together the budget. So, what we want to do is help to sift through that noise and give people tools to organize their process around investment in those things that work.”

She is particularly excited with the way these kinds of approaches can help in the procurement process to think about “how proposals are getting evaluated based off of their use of evidence in strategies that we know that work. . . One of the things that I care deeply about is helping our local financial leaders and performance leaders think about how to identify the stuff that they’re either funding through the budget process or through a contract that’s not working and that’s tied to programs that are not producing results and how can we look at ways that we can shift dollars from those items to these evidence-based solutions that we know are focused on these key outcomes that matter most to our residents.”

She concludes with a mission statement: To make sure that “the very valuable dollars that residents are paying through their taxes are going to solutions that work.”