New Leader of Social Innovation Fund Answers Questions About Upcoming Federal Grants

Paul L. Carttar began work this month as director of the Social Innovation Fund, the new federal grant program designed to help nonprofit groups expand effective social programs.

The fund, managed by the Corporation for National and Community Service, will award $50-million to “intermediary grant makers” by July. These recipients will in turn provide grants to innovative charities for projects in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development, and healthy living by February 2011.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Carttar discussed the importance of the new program’s emphasis on results and its potential impact beyond the groups that get the “relatively limited” amount of federal money.

Excerpts of the interview follow.

What are your main priorities in the next few months?

The first priority for us right now is to ensure that we have in place a process that will lead to the selection of absolutely the soundest, most creative, innovative intermediaries possible. Our challenge to them has been pretty straightforward, which is: You tell us what you think you can do within the basic guidelines of what the SIF is all about, the three areas of focus, the emphasis on evidence. We feel that the best answers into how we solve these social problems will reside in the field among people who are currently working in communities around the country to help address problems to improve the lives of American citizens and others.

How will the Social Innovation Fund be a model for other federal agencies?

As we think about the general objective of trying to make nonprofit grant decisions as effective and productive as possible, you really cannot fail to account for the role the federal government currently plays in funding of nonprofits. The key thing we’re aiming to focus on is the reliance on indications and evidence of the achievement of real results. We think that as kind of a nuclear concept one of the most critical things that can make the nonprofit sector as effective as possible is increasingly channeling resources to nonprofits that have actually demonstrated that the work they do changes people’s lives. So the Social Innovation Fund has the opportunity to play a significant role in that as we advance the understanding of the government, of processes that do work effectively, of mechanisms that can be undertaken for identifying organizations that really do demonstrate significant impact.

How do you balance the tension between wanting to do something innovative and the need to show Congress results?

The enemy of innovation is a framework for allocating resources on some basis other than real results. We don’t think there’s any tension at all. A lot of people have suggested that because there’s an age dimension to the ability to demonstrate results, this favors older organizations relative to newer organizations. First of all, we wouldn’t be prepared to concede that. But secondly, we could say with confidence this isn’t about new organizations versus old organizations, it’s about organizations doing the best work, driving the greatest impact. In this respect, just as with the private economy, the organizations that ultimately drive the biggest impact are going to be ones that are continually reinventing themselves. Sometimes they’ll be big and sometimes they’ll be small or new.

What about organizations that might not have had time to prove what they’re doing works?

If the question is, what really does make a difference, or what has impact, we are trying to encourage organizations to provide the most compelling, complete, and accurate answers to that question as possible. In some cases, depending on the particular domain of activity or the size of the organization or whatever, it may lend itself to one level of proof—maybe an advanced level, like the randomized control trials, which has frequently been mentioned as the gold standard of proof. But we’re not staking our claim on RCT. We’re staking our claim on each organization doing what they can and what makes sense to provide compelling demonstration of their impact, and where the advanced type of proof is not feasible, we’ll look to them to generate the best there is.

What is the role of the “learning communities?”

The learning community will be one of the most important ways to broaden the impact of the SIF. It starts with the intermediaries who are the direct grantees but we have every expectation that it will extend well beyond that to other nonprofits, as well as to the generation of knowledge and practices that can be themselves accessed by other nonprofits—or the generation of information about discrete nonprofits that are generating high impact that can be made accessible to other funders who wouldn’t otherwise have the wherewithal to identify other organizations like this.