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As Policy Director in the Mayor's Office, Anjali Chainani founded the GovLabPHL Initiative in 2016, an initiative centered on elevating the practical use of data and evidence across city government.

The 2020 GovLabPHL conference provided actionable, evidence-based insights from social science that were later used by the City during Mayor Kenney's second term to advance key priorities including  poverty reduction, education, and violence prevention.

Anjali played an instrumental role in the Mayor's Office to compete and with the 2018 Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor's Challenge.  The City of Philadelphia was awarded $1 million to work towards making the justice system less traumatic for young people under 18 by creating new facilities specifically designed to address trauma and connect kids with resources rather than sending them to regular police stations.

Anjali led the development, implementation, and analysis of the second “Philadelphia Resident Survey” for the Kenney Administration to ask Philadelphians how local government should prioritize Philadelphia's $4.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2021 and in the five-year plan. 

​Anjali managed the collaboration which included the Mayor's Policy Office, Mayor's Office of Civic Engagement and Volunteer Services, the Office of Performance Management, and Temple University's Institute of Survey Research.

Under Anjali's leadership, GovLabPHL, the Commissioner’s Office, and researchers from the
University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University tested different kinds of get-out-the-vote mail. 48,000 registered voters were randomly selected to receive mail from the Commissioner’s Office.

Overall, the mail was effective: people who received any mail turned out at 29.5 percent in the general election, a 1.1 percentage point increase over the control group (the equivalent of about 11,500 votes, if cards were sent to the whole city).

People who received primary reminders and follow-ups were more likely to vote in the general election (29.8 percent) than people who received mail only before the general election (29.1 percent). Due to the research design, we know that this difference is unlikely from chance alone (p = 0.058). Publications will be posted soon.