August 2025 marks a major milestone for the Coleridge Initiative: five years of turning data into action and insights for the public good.

What began as a bold experiment—to build a secure, collaborative infrastructure for linking administrative data across agencies and states—has evolved into a thriving national ecosystem for evidence-based policymaking. Through strong partnerships with state and federal agencies, academic institutions, and philanthropic funders, Coleridge has helped unlock the potential of data to inform more inclusive, effective, and timely decisions for communities.

In just five years, the Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF) has supported over 130 research projects, spanning education, workforce, support services, and other sectors. Programs like the Democratizing Our Data Challenge have led to the development of powerful tools like Arkansas’s AIROS dashboard and the Multi-State Postsecondary Report. We’ve delivered hands-on Applied Data Analytics training to over 1,000 government professionals, building capacity at every level of government. And we’ve partnered with Federal agencies like the USDA to modernize coding workflows and launch a secure enclave for food and agricultural data research.

These are just a few examples of the incredible work we’ve accomplished in our first five years. But it is about more than infrastructure and data. We are mission driven and partnership minded. By working together, we can all make data-driven policymaking more accessible and more powerful, while operating with purpose and innovation.

As we look forward, we do so with momentum and clarity. Our mission is more relevant than ever, and our ability to deliver is stronger than it’s ever been.

Let’s keep building together.