Eli Vitulli - Founder and primary researcher

I am a progressive movement researcher with about a decade of experience providing strategic research for grassroots organizing campaigns. For the past seven years, I was a researcher at Popular Democracy where I provided research on multiple policy issues—including the criminal legal system, healthcare, housing, climate, the economy, education, and others—on federal, state, and local levels. I also have expertise on issues of racial, disability, LGB, and transgender equity and experience.

I thrive working closely with impacted community members to help them translate their experiences and needs into research, publications, and policy solutions and also translating complex policies, research, and data in ways that are accessible to community members and other stakeholders.

I have extensive experience with both qualitative and quantitative research, including conducting surveys, interviews, focus groups, oral histories and other historical methods, FOIAs and open records requests, working with large datasets (such as Census/American Community Survey and Bureau of Labor Statistics data and accessor/property data), and municipal, school district, and federal budget analyses. I particularly love participatory action research (PAR), which is a research methodology in which those being researched are the researchers. I am a skilled facilitator of PAR, working with community organizations and community members to develop research projects, implement the research, and analyze the data to help support organizing campaigns to improve their communities. I have also created trainings for community members in different research methods, including developing curriculum and facilitating trainings.

I also have extensive experience project managing and coordinating short and long term projects with multiple partner organizations and stakeholders. My work at PD involved managing projects for many of the organization’s 50 local and state affiliate organizations and often coalition partners as well. 

I have a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a dissertation on the history of how US jail and prison systems managed incarcerated gender nonconforming and transgender people. I also taught for a number of years in women’s and gender studies and American studies departments in a number of colleges and universities.