CCFP 25th Anniversary Spotlight: Q&A with Joel Rosch

As part of the Center for Child and Family Policy's 25th Anniversary celebration, we are honoring faculty, researchers, and staff who have contributed to the Center's work, culture, and impact.

Joel Rosch was a senior research scholar at the Center from 2000 to 2020,where he led collaborations with many of the Center’s government and non-profit partners.

Read on to learn more about Joel’s early work on Family Connects, favorite memories of the Center, and career highlights.

What year did you start working at the Center for Child and Family Policy and how long did you work here? 

I began working at the Center in 2000 and worked for 20 amazing years until age and COVID led me to retire completely in 2020.

Could you briefly describe the focus of your work at CCFP?

The focus of my work was to help connect the research we were doing at Duke with government agencies and the general policy process. As someone who has worked both in academia and in government agencies, I had long been frustrated by how difficult it was to get policymakers to use research that could help them achieve their goals. For me, the job I had at the Center was a perfect fit with my skills and interests.

Most of the impact of my work, both at Duke and before coming to Duke, had to do with finding ways to help government agencies work together and with the public to improve public services. Early in my academic career, I became interested in two related concepts: first, the role frontline workers play in all our service delivery systems; and second, the idea that service systems work best when they are co-produced by agencies working cooperatively with citizens and other agencies. At CCFP I was able to use these insights to help inform a number of our successful initiatives.

What’s one of your favorite stories or memories from your years at CCFP? 

I guess my favorite memories have to do with how we all felt when we secured funding or received recognition for one of our initiatives.

What are you most proud of from your time at CCFP?

Where to begin…

1. Today I’m most proud of the way my colleagues at the Center play a vital role in how research is used when developing and implementing child policy in North Carolina. That is what I was hired to help make happen and it happened. What I saw working on child policy in state government during the 1990s was an almost total lack of research-based policymaking. Today that has changed, and the Center played a key role in that transformation. Ken Dodge hired the right people and created a climate that made it easy for me to help connect my colleagues to the right people so we could get the best information into the policy process.
2. I was very proud of my role in putting together our substance abuse prevention center grant. It was a very competitive process and the section I wrote received a really good score. While I had published academic articles and written some small grants, I had never achieved success in the most competitive of academic settings. I felt really good about what I wrote in that grant and how it was received. To me, this was the best evidence of how the culture at CCFP enabled me to thrive and make a real contribution. It gave me the confidence to try to do more.
3. This may sound silly, but I felt really good about coming up with the idea of using emergency room visits as one of the variables we used to measure success in what began as the Durham Family Initiative, which later became Durham Connects and then Family Connects. This was a real synthesis of my detailed, from-the-ground-up knowledge of how social services systems actually worked and my academic interest in measurement.

What’s something people might not know about the Center that you would want people to know? 

I’m not sure people appreciate how much the Center created a culture that gave people the opportunity to thrive.

How did CCFP change during your time here? 

That’s interesting. The projects changed and the personnel changed but the culture of cooperation across multidisciplinary lines never changed.

What’s something people might not know about you?

I’m not sure. I was a sprinter in high school?  I’m pretty open about my life and pretty talkative, so most people at CCFP know most of what there is to know about me. I’ve always believed that we are who we appear to be. Odd as it may sound, I do not think there is a “hidden Joel” people do not know.

What’s one way you’ve seen your work impact policy at a local, state, or federal level? 

One?

I feel really privileged to have been involved in so many projects that had a real impact on people’s lives, so it’s hard to choose one.

Before I came to Duke, I worked on two career-defining projects.

Working with some talented scientists, I helped North Carolina become one of the first states to participate in and use the FBI CODIS system that enables law enforcement to search DNA databases to help solve sex crimes and many violent crimes.

Later, I was part of a small group that played a key role in getting North Carolina to adopt the graduated driver’s license system which reduced the number of young people who die or are seriously injured in car crashes.

Note that it was always as part of a team, alone very little.

At Duke, I worked with my colleagues on projects to reduce school dropouts, reduce substance abuse, and improve the way child protective services and juvenile justice agencies function. All of these had a real impact.

What is your favorite children’s book and why? 

Danny, Champion of the World – it is about resilience and creating an opportunity for efficacy.

Are there any books that you continue to return to and why? 

One Hundred Years of Solitude – as I age the book changes and there are new insights.

What’s one of your favorite local restaurants and what is one of your favorite things on the menu?

Pizzeria Toro – any basic pizza, the simpler the better, I’m a purist.

What was your favorite game as a child?

Touch football.

If you had to choose just one, what is a takeaway from your work or research that you would want to share? 

The key takeaway for me is that our success came from a culture of teamwork working within a multidisciplinary environment. None of us have all the answers, but together, being open to different kinds of ideas, we can do a lot, and we did.