Social Innovation Fund FY 2012

initiative, United We Serve. In 2009, Congress passed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (SAA), the most sweeping expansion of national service in a generation. This landmark law not only expands service opportunities, it focuses national service on key outcomes; builds the capacity of individuals, nonprofits, and communities to succeed; and encourages innovative approaches to solving problems, including through the establishment of the Social Innovation Fund. The Social Innovation Fund is itself an innovative program that awards grants to existing grantmaking institutions, or “intermediaries,” who in turn subgrant funds to promising community-based nonprofit organizations to validate and grow outcomes-focused approaches to challenges facing local communities in three priority issue areas: • Youth Development; • Economic Opportunity; and • Healthy Futures. The Social Innovation Fund directs resources toward increasing the evidence base, capacity and scale of the organizations it funds in order to improve the lives of people served by those organizations. The operating model of the Social Innovation Fund has been explicitly designed to advance these objectives and is distinguished by four key elements: (1) reliance on intermediaries with strong skills and track records of success to do the critical work of selecting, validating, and growing high-impact nonprofit organizations; (2) requirements that each federal dollar granted by the Social Innovation Fund be matched 1:1 by the intermediaries with money from private and other non-federal sources and that subgrants by these intermediaries be matched 1:1 by subgrantees; (3) requirements that all grantees engage each of their subgrantees in formal evaluations of program performance and impact; and (4) a commitment to knowledge sharing and other initiatives that advance social innovation more generally in the nonprofit sector.