Geoffrey Canada and several other nonprofit leaders spoke at the White House yesterday at an event focused on the president’s $50 million Social Innovation Fund (here’s a fact sheet and here is the underlying legal language). Some excerpts from President Obama’s remarks follow below.
We’re going to use this fund to find the most promising non-profits in America. We’ll examine their data and rigorously evaluate their outcomes. We’ll invest in those with the best results that are most likely to provide a good return on our taxpayer dollars. And we’ll require that they get matching investments from the private sector — from businesses and foundations and philanthropists — to make those taxpayer dollars go even further.
And today, I’m announcing that I’ll be asking Melody Barnes, who is our director of the Domestic Policy Council, and our innovation team to lead this process, traveling across the country to discover and evaluate the very best programs in our communities.
If you are interested in seeing the event, it is available on C-SPAN. Andrew Wolk has written a first person account of the event on his blog.
I think it is encouraging that Geoffrey Canada was there. Promise Neighborhoods, after all, represents a new focus on combining the efforts of the nonprofit social service-providing community with schools. Those who have experience with afterschool programming know that public schools are not always particularly responsive to the nonprofit community. As Betsy Fuch points out in her Modern Giving blog, the Education Department’s What Works Fund has $650 million in stimulus money to play with, which is more than the $50 million for this Social Innovation Fund. And Promise Neighborhoods itself appears to be located in the U.S. Department of Education under Jim Shelton. All of this begs the question, so how serious is the administration about the nonprofit side of this initiative?
That question is partly answered, we hope, by this event. Melody Barnes is an important player in this administration. Her deputy, Roberto Rodriguez (also a former Kennedy staffer), is also involved in Promise Neighborhoods. We hope that these players keep us in the nonprofit community in the mix.
Meanwhile, David Ian Henderson, CEO of Idealistics, makes an important point in his blog about the Social Innovation Fund, which is how do you know which programs are innovative and really working? This is also an important issue for Promise Neighborhoods, and I know from talking to some administration people that coming up with metrics for Promise Neighborhoods is a significant focus for the people devising a legislative proposal. David doesn’t think the government should be setting these standards more generally, though that’s probably not applicable in the case of Promise Neighborhoods. One of the difficulties of setting metrics for a program like Promise Neighborhoods is that there is likely to be a different mix of programs in each community. In this case, the lessons from the ROMA (Results Oriented Management and Accounting) program for the Community Services Block Grant may be instructive.