Social Justice & Community
Applying the science of social impact
UC Santa Cruz alumna Jennifer Rigney uses her Ph.D. in Psychology to support mission-based organizations in making effective, data-based decisions about their programs. She has helped advance the ocean conservation goals of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and now supports early childhood development as the director of evaluation and learning for First Five Monterey County.
For mission-based organizations like nonprofits and government agencies, bringing about positive change on big issues isn’t just a matter of working hard and believing in the cause. It requires taking the right types of action to leverage limited resources for the greatest possible impact. Research and program evaluation efforts help organizations to make effective, data-based decisions. And insights from psychology are often an essential part of that process.
UC Santa Cruz alumna Jennifer Rigney has spent more than a decade applying research skills from her Ph.D. in Psychology to help organizations engage communities and shift human behavior in ways that move the needle on issues ranging from ocean conservation to healthy early childhood development.
“I love my job, because I’ve always had an interest in systems change,” Rigney said. “Now I get to support organizations that are doing that work by helping them with data-informed decision-making.”
Rigney got her start in the field as she was completing her doctorate in developmental psychology. Her advisor, Distinguished Professor Maureen Callanan, had often studied how children learn in informal settings, like museums, so when the Monterey Bay Aquarium wanted to evaluate the impact of their summer theatrical programs for children, they reached out to Callanan’s lab group for help. Rigney had a chance to work on that project, which led to other opportunities with the aquarium, and eventually a full-time role as manager of Social Science Research and Evaluation.
Rigney’s work at the aquarium helped guide the organization’s public education strategy, which included engaging visitors on how issues like climate change, overfishing, and plastics pollution affect ocean health, and how we can all work together in our communities to address these challenges.
“A lot of my role was collaborating with the people who led the visitor experience at the aquarium, thinking through what they were hoping to get out of an exhibit or theatrical or interpretive program and the logic of how to get there,” she explained. “And then once programs were in place, we were providing data to help staff understand how programs were making progress on inspiring conservation of the ocean with visitors and identifying any potential changes that might lead to improvements.”
After working with the aquarium for seven years, Rigney went on to become director of evaluation and learning for First Five Monterey County, a public agency focused on early childhood development. In her current role, she works with the agency’s extensive network of funded partners to support evaluation and continuous quality improvement for policy and advocacy efforts, workforce capacity-building training, and direct services for families. She also analyzes county-wide data to better understand how systems are serving local families and children, from the prenatal phase through age five.
“One of my current projects is collecting school readiness data and contextualizing that in terms of systems that support financial stability, nutrition, health care, child care, and parent-child relationships,” she said. “We’re interested in evaluating those systems and how they promote healthy development, because our ultimate goal and mission is that all children have what they need to thrive.”
Rigney says her doctoral training at UC Santa Cruz exposed her to a wide range of creative methods for investigating complex research questions, giving her a robust toolbox to pull from when designing custom evaluations for innovative public impact programs. She also appreciates that her training emphasized a strengths-based model of development. That perspective helped draw her to UC Santa Cruz, and it’s something that she now applies to her daily work.
“The developmental psychology faculty at UC Santa Cruz really focus on the socio-cultural context of development,” she explained. “When we think about the cultural nature of development, there is not one best way to do it. Children from all backgrounds have different strengths for learning, and it’s much more productive to focus on tapping into those strengths than to fall into a deficit model of thinking about people.”
Rigney says she’s grateful for the opportunities she’d had thus far in her career to support organizations working to change systems for the better, and she encourages today’s graduate students to think outside the box when it comes to following their own passions.
“I didn’t go the traditional route of going after a tenure-track faculty position, so if you’re someone who’s feeling like that’s not the path for you, be open to trying things like consulting, which can really help you figure out what you want to do,” she said. “You might have to piece a few things together at first, and it’s not linear, but that’s okay. Just be open to different possibilities, and that will help get you to where you’re meant to be.”