The Clinton Foundation on Monday unveiled a new initiative to help state and local governments develop and enact nonpartisan policy solutions to improve health outcomes, especially for women and children, economic security and democracy.

The Clinton Policy Institute, the foundation’s first new initiative in more than a decade, has already begun convening political leaders from both parties, research experts and Americans affected by the issues being studied to create new approaches to long-standing problems.

“Rising costs, economic uncertainty, rapid technological change and increasing pressures on our public institutions are making it harder for families to get ahead,” former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement to The Associated Press. “We created CPI because we believe there are still practical, evidence-based solutions that can improve people’s lives.”

CPI is building on its work with New York State to ban cell phones in schools during the last academic year. Although the institute technically did not exist last year when it partnered with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration to create distraction-free schools in the state, the Clinton Foundation saw promise in its strategy and decided to expand it before publicly announcing the creation of the CPI. It’s a strategy the foundation, also led by former President Bill Clinton and public health expert Chelsea Clinton, used when it launched the Clinton Health Access Initiative in 2004.

Zayn Siddique, former principal deputy director of the National Policy Council, will serve as executive director of the CPI. Jennifer Klein, who was director of the White House Gender Policy Council under President Joe Biden, will be CPI chair.

In New York, CPI helped create the Teen Tech Council so students could help make the phone ban program more effective. The result, according to Hochul’s office, was that educators found a marked improvement in classroom behavior and participation.

“CPI brings together policymakers, researchers, business leaders and community organizations to identify what works, build stronger policy networks and help turn those ideas into policy,” said Hillary Clinton. “We’re especially focusing on states and local communities, where so much innovation is happening.”

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said a CPI conference on improving children’s lives earlier this month was “the best roundtable I’ve participated in since becoming governor.”

Kelly, who will leave office in January due to term limits after serving two consecutive terms, said she was inspired by CPI’s nonpartisan approach to solving issues affecting children.

“I’m a Democratic governor in what is considered a very red state,” Kelly told The Associated Press in an interview. “It became very clear to me that if I wanted to achieve anything in my political life, I would have to do it in a bipartisan way.”

Kelly believes that despite political polarization, the CPI can succeed in finding nonpartisan solutions (especially on issues related to children and health care) and providing state leaders with the research and other support to implement them.

“Every once in a while, you get people from both sides of the aisle who come together and come up with, maybe not sexy legislation, but something that really needed to be done,” Kelly said. “And they achieve it.”

Dr. Jerome Adams, former U.S. Surgeon General during President Donald Trump’s first administration, agrees that nonpartisan solutions can be found. But he says the nonpartisan nature of the solutions has to be intentional.

“Healthcare is inherently political,” Adams said. “When you talk about access to health care coverage, when you talk about women’s health issues, particularly around the issue of abortion and contraception, when you talk about drug policy and being in favor of harm reduction, when you talk about gun safety, these are all inherently political issues.”

That gets even more complicated, Adams said, because “we live in a country that is very binary, so every issue, no matter how nuanced it is, for electoral purposes becomes black/white, yes/no, all or none.”

However, Adams said CPI has already found a way to achieve bipartisan buy-in for some of its solutions to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In 2020, the state of California launched the ACEs Aware initiative to begin detecting ACEs (including abuse, neglect, and domestic challenges) and treating them early to reduce the impact and cost to the state in the future.

Through CPI, Adams was asked to become co-chair of the ACE Resource Network’s National Leadership Council in June in an effort to bring California’s work on treating ACEs to other states.

“I’m very interested in work that has practical, proven solutions,” he said. “We call states and say, ‘Hey, let’s look at the best evidence in terms of what works around adverse childhood experiences and policies at the state level and then try to implement them in your state.'”

That strategy has led Republican-led states like Utah and Georgia to consider parts of Democratic-led California’s work on the issue, Adams said.

He said it’s a sign that the CPI approach works and can be expanded to other areas.

The Clinton Foundation hopes so.

“Too many people have lost faith that progress is possible,” said Hillary Clinton. “But across the country, leaders are developing innovative policies that strengthen families and communities. Those ideas deserve to be shared and expanded.”

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