Three Things To Watch With The Social Innovation Fund

The New Year is bringing with it an accelerated buzz and excitement around the forthcoming Social Innovation Fund. A few weeks ago, the Corporation for National and Community Service released funding guidelines and asked for public comment. Sean has been curating that conversation on Tactical Philanthropy and an excellent guest post by nonprofit consultant Adin Miller prompted me to think about the three things I'm watching for with the Social Innovation Fund.

1) Collaboration. The Fund will work be allocating $5m-$10m grants to foundation intermediaries, who regrant the money. Foundations are required to match those grants, meaning that only foundations with a significant amount of cash on hand can participate. That said, the Notice of Available Funds (NOFA) encourages funding collaboratives to form. I love seeing incentives for funders to work together, but it's also a difficult proposition. I'll be interested to see how this plays out.

2) Leverage. The whole premise of this fund is that, through matching as well as the Social Innovation Fund's better access to other government programs, it provides more leverage and a better pipeline from social innovation to policy. In my mind this is the make or break piece of things for whether the SIF is the beginning of something immensely important or just another funding source - albeit a cool one. There is some alignment and hopefully coordination possible with the Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund, which is promising.

3) Innovation (vs. Proven Impact). The real nugget of tension is how to bring the "innovation" out in "investing in what works" which is also the mantra of the Fund. Former Ford Foundation leader (and well known Philanthrocapitalism critic) Michael Edwards wrote about how the requirements for how nonprofits demonstrate impact are constricting and potentially counter-productive in the comments of one of Sean's earlier posts. I think that getting proven younger (if not brand new) approaches into a pipeline where they can impact other government policy bodies seems more important than investing in brand new innovative approaches, given the SIF's potentially unique placement. That said, most evaluation frameworks are littered of wholes, so my hope is that invest serious resources in their own review process rather than relying on strict structures.

BONUS: Bureaucracy. At the end of the day, the question will be whether the aggregate benefit of the government as a funder - in terms of whatever advantages that synergy might create - is worth the cost of the process of applying and doing the reporting. While government processes are often bureaucratic nightmares, the reality is that the foundation funding process tends not to be all that much better. I'll be watching to see whether the SIF can reduce the pain of the experience.

(Photo: Laffy4k)