The Social Innovation Fund is an initiative of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) intended to improve the lives of people in low-income communities. It does so by mobilizing public and private resources to grow promising, innovative community-based solutions that have evidence of compelling impact in three areas of priority need: economic opportunity, healthy futures, and youth development.
The Social Innovation Fund employs an operating and program model that is itself innovative and truly represents a "new way of doing business" for the federal government. This model is distinguished by four key characteristics:
The requirement that each federal dollar granted be matched 1:1 by the grantees and again by their subgrantees with money from private and other non-federal sources, thereby increasing the return on taxpayer dollars and strengthening local support.
- Reliance on outstanding existing grantmaking "intermediaries" to select high-impact community organizations rather than building new government infrastructure.
- On requirement that each federal dollar granted be matched 1:1 by the grantees and again by their subgrantees with money from private and other non-federal sources, thereby increasing the return on taxpayer dollars and strengthening local support.
- Emphasis on rigorous evaluations of program results not only to improve accountability but also to build a stronger marketplace of organizations with evidence of impact.
- Effective leverage of the grant program through supplementary initiatives that advance social innovation more generally in the nonprofit sector.