Kim Gilliam, ASA Marketing Project Manager

The ASA is a member of the Consortium of Social Science Associations, a nonprofit advocacy organization working to promote and advance the social and behavioral sciences in federal policymaking. What does this mean for ASA members? Tune in to this Q&A with COSSA Executive Director Wendy Naus to find out.

Tell us about your role at COSSA and the mission of the consortium.

COSSA is the Consortium of Social Science Associations, and I have had the privilege of serving as its executive director for the last nine years. I’ve been a professional advocate and lobbyist for almost 20 years in the DC policymaking area. I like to say I have dedicated my career to advancing the policy interests of ‘noble causes.’ In this case, those noble causes are the social and behavioral sciences.

COSSA engages in direct lobbying with Congress, but we also serve as a representative of the social science, behavioral science, and statistical and data science communities before federal policymaking audiences, serving as a bridge between the research enterprise and government. We help translate scientific information and findings into, hopefully, sound policy and increased funding for the important work our researchers do.

How does the ASA’s COSSA membership benefit and affect our members?

COSSA really wouldn’t exist without professional organizations like the ASA—and we are 100 percent in service to our members. We serve as an umbrella voice for all the different fields within the social, behavioral, and statistical sciences and we have a singular focus, which is advocacy for everyone—lifting all boats, so to speak.

One of my regular talking points is that if your professional association—like the ASA—is a member of COSSA, that means you are automatically a member of COSSA, too. In other words, anyone affiliated with a COSSA membership organization is eligible to receive any members-only benefits we offer, whether that’s webinars, participation in our advocacy events, policy analyses, or simply engaging with our staff to gain expertise in or information about what’s happening at a certain federal agency or Congress. And so, there are tangible member benefits in the form of resources, talking points, and tools researchers can use.

But what I think is a really important aspect of COSSA membership is the building of community. Our consortium allows statisticians to ‘be in the room’ (or virtual room) with others across the social, behavioral, statistical, and data sciences and learn how different disciplines and fields are tackling challenging scientific questions and complicated societal issues.

In short, a member organization can get out of COSSA whatever it wants. Some are less active in advocacy, themselves, and like to be part of a larger community effort. Others wish to engage their members in grassroots advocacy and look to COSSA to help facilitate that through training, advice, and other services.

Let’s drill down a bit further and talk about a particular benefit: the “Why Social Science?” project. Would you say a little bit about that and why there has to be a “Why Social Science?” project?

I am really proud of “Why Social Science?” This is an initiative we started five or six years ago but has been a long time in the making because of the challenges our fields have faced for decades. The primary impetus is that not everyone understands what social science is or the value it holds, especially when taxpayer dollars are being spent on it. It can translate to significant challenges to our sciences (such as funding cuts) when the most vocal critics sit in positions of power like in the United States Congress.

I always say the social and behavioral sciences have a bit of a branding problem in that everyone thinks they know what they are. We often hear things like, “social science is common sense” or “I know how to create a Google form and therefore can do my own survey.” We developed “Why Social Science?” as a way to address these misconceptions and make the social and behavioral sciences more accessible to the general public. We simply ask our authors—researchers, members of Congress, people from industry, students—to answer the question “why is social science important” from their unique vantage point. The result is a suite of short, easy-to-understand accounts of how social, behavioral, and statistical science are shaping our everyday lives.

We hear about innovations in criminal justice, lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, advancements in early childhood education, and other societal topics we all confront on a daily basis. In short, they tell the story of how our sciences are everywhere and underscore the need to bring them to bear on the big questions that affect us all.

I understand you were a lobbyist for 20 years. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey to that career?

That’s a great question, and my answer is probably not very satisfying. I’m one of those people who did not know what they wanted to be when they grew up. I’m from Buffalo, New York, and I graduated college with a political science degree. I did the typical internship in Washington as an undergrad and knew immediately this is where I wanted to be. I enjoyed politics and history, but besides that, didn’t know if I wanted to work on Capitol Hill or go to law school or something else.

I was incredibly fortunate in that one of my professors in Buffalo had a connection at a lobbying firm in Washington that was seeking recent graduates to join their team. To be honest, I don’t think I really understood what a lobbyist was when I was hired, but I was excited to be getting my start in DC. As it turns out, lobbying—and advocacy more generally—is perfect for anyone looking to make a difference in the world.

For the last two decades, I have been able to advocate for causes that are important to me and, hopefully, add some value to the discourse around science policy. It can be a very satisfying vocation—when it is not frustrating.

COSSA’s website includes an action center. Tell us about it and how you hope members will use it.

We launched the action center a year ago when we completed a full overhaul of our website. I have focused a lot of energy over these last nine years on member benefits and making our resources as easy to find as possible for those who want to use them. We built the action center to serve as a central location for things like talking points, policy briefs, action alerts, and our advocacy handbook that explains the how-tos of effective advocacy. But what we’re really excited about, especially in this post-COVID world, is the content we’ll be adding soon about ways to become an advocate from home.

You don’t have to come to Washington to engage in this process. There are ways you can build relationships and use your expertise to help inform policy without having to leave your home. I think we’re living in such an activist time right now and people want their voices to be heard. We want to encourage that as much as possible.

What do you think COSSA’s significant challenges and opportunities are?

Great question. I find myself struggling in the challenge department these days because we’re in such a different place than we were, say, nine years ago when I started. There was at that time definitely a target on the back of our sciences; there were policymakers actively trying to defund the social sciences. And while attacks like that still happen from time to time, it is not the norm presently.

The social and behavioral sciences are having a moment in which government officials acknowledge their value and utility. They are realizing that whether you are talking about climate change or COVID or the racial reckoning of the last couple of years, these are all human-centered problems for which sound data and scientific inquiry are needed.

My main concern in this regard is that, as a community, we don’t step up to the call for more social science. Policymakers want information our sciences can provide; now what we need is for researchers to make themselves available to policymakers and offer their expertise. This is a major opportunity to change the conversation around the value of social and behavioral science in the eyes of the public and our elected officials.

The other challenge I see is a continuous one, and that’s champion development. We are losing several strong champions for social and behavioral science at the end of the 117th Congress, when some of our more vocal supporters will retire. And so, regardless of how which party controls the chambers starting in 2023, we have a lot of work to do to nurture new champions for science in general and social science in particular.