Breaking: The Social Innovation Fund Gets A New Director

The $50 million Social Innovation Fund has a new director. According to an announcement from the Corporation for National and Community Service, the fund will now be run by Paul Carttar, cofounder of Bridgespan, an executive partner at New Profit, Inc, and in general, a seriously thoughtful dude.

I met Paul last year at the Skoll World Forum and was really impressed with the way that Paul had carved out a space at the intersection between doing business and doing good. Even more, he struck me as a person who was also looking to understand the future in the context of past and present trends.

His more formal bio reads like, well...like the Director of the Social Innovation Fund. In 1999, Paul co-founded the Bridgespan Group out of Bain & Company consulting and helped grow it into one of the most respected nonprofit consulting groups in the country. He has also served as the Chief Operating Officer for the Kauffman Foundation -- the only foundation focused entirely on promoting and enabling entrepreneurship. For the last few years, he's been working as a partner with the innovative venture philanthropy firm New Profit, Inc.

Before his tenure in the social sector, Paul worked in a number of different roles across the corporate, public and venture capital worlds, including stints as an economist and researcher for the Senate and as an entrepreneur in the health care space. The experience of working in multiple sectors is sure to color his approach to the Fund -- in a way I think will be positive.

Way more important than any of those credentials to me is that one of his first acts as Director was to reach out to Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy to talk about how Sean's coverage of the broader conversation about the Fund was appreciated by the SIF administrators. In their conversation, Carttar suggested that the key to the success of the fund would not be just that it supported great nonprofits, but that it would change "how dollars are allocated in the philanthropic sector."

I've written before about the key issues that the Fund needs to address to be truly successful. These include how it creates incentives for cross-funder collaboration, how well it leverages its $50 million to double or triple that number of new dollars enabled, how much it funds proven impact vs. truly innovative work, and how slow moving and bureaucratic vs. nimble the whole thing is.

The biggest question I have is still how relevant the SIF will feel. Will this just be another pipeline for the same sort of projects already on the tips of the tongues of all the big institutional funders, or will they substantively differentiate themselves either in who they choose to fund or how they do it?

Only time will tell, but I'm glad to see Paul at the helm, and I wish him all the luck in the world.

Read the press release announcing the appointment here, or watch my conversation with Paul at last year's Skoll Forum below:

SWF09 Interviews: Paul Carttar from Nathaniel Whittemore on Vimeo.

Photo credit: Nathaniel Whittemore