"Pay for Success"

One element of the social labs approach that excited me was the attempt to shift from the idea of funding "proven" programs and instead supporting innovative risk-taking. The current paradigm--prove it, then we'll give you money--is challenging to organizations that are on the ground, working with people in communities ripe for change, with some exciting new ideas on what might work but simply lacking the resources to give them a shot. As someone who has done a fair amount of grant writing for a small grassroots nonprofit, the whole exercise of securing grants (or any other sort of funding, really) does not seem built to reward true innovation. It's more akin to trying to get your first "real" job out of college--in order to get a job, you need a proven track record of experience on your resume...but in order to get that experience, you need to get a job. A very high-stakes game of chicken and egg!

A quick Google search for "social labs success" pointed me to the Corporation for National and Community Service, the organization that oversees, among other things, the Americorps program. The page I landed on was called the "Social Innovation Fund." Here's the opening paragraph about the SIF model:

The Social Innovation Fund (SIF) is a key White House initiative and program of the Corporation for National and Community Service that awards grants to identify, validate, and grow promising approaches to challenges facing local communities.

It sounds promising--a government initiative that claims to want to support new ways of solving old as well as emerging challenges. There's a lot of language about finding "solutions that work", bringing private and public partners together to help people at the community level. But you'll forgive my skepticism about whether these are the words of leaders who are truly committed to this approach or just a bunch of marketing fluff to cover up the same old, same old approach.

One of the other programs tied to SIF is called Pay for Success. I get the idea--pour money into the initiatives that have proven effective. Certainly we don't want the government throwing money at things that don't work (Congress has already mastered that art). I wondered, though, who is defining "success"? What indicators are being evaluated to determine whether an effort is worth paying for? Is risk-taking and boldness being rewarded? I hope so--but as Hassan (2014) notes in the introduction to his book, when it comes to social change, "we fund tightly controlled five-year plans." (p.8) What will it take to shake us out of that mindset and understand that "failure" breeds innovation. Why is it that this concept is not hard to grasp when we're talking about how Post-It Notes were accidentally invented by 3-M, but not when we are talking about programs that affect entire communities?

As a somewhat related aside, I wanted to share the article below from  yesterday's Bangor Daily News. While I'm hardly objective on this issue (I feel strongly that cities should not be penalized for using GA to provide help to those in greatest need, no matter where they were born), I think it's clear that the governor is trying to convince the public that Portland has been unsuccessful in managing GA funds based on a singular measure--cost per person in poverty--without considering the full context. It's also clear to me that we are not going to solve this problem through the same approaches that have been used in the past.

Mayor calls DHHS claim that Portland mismanaging General Assistance a scheme to pit small Maine towns against cities

References:

Corporation for National and Community Service. Social innovation fund. Retrieved on February 10, 2015 from http://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/social-innovation-fund

Hassan, Z. (2014). The social labs revolution. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Thistle, S. (2015, February 9). Mayor blasts DHHS claim that Portland mismanages General Assistance. Sun Journal. Retrieved on February 10, 2015 from http://bangordailynews.com/2015/02/09/politics/mayor-calls-dhhs-claim-that-portland-mismanages-general-assistance-a-scheme-to-pit-small-maine-towns-against-cities/