How effective will the Social Innovation Fund prove to be in the long-run?

After reading the articles by Michelle Jolin, I was interested in learning more about the Obama Administration’s efforts to support social innovation and began looking into the Social Innovation Fund. I found that, in August, the Corporation for National and Community Service announced the newest set of recipients of the Social Innovation Fund’s competitive grant competition. (See news realease: http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/releases_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=2024) This year, the awards will go to five intermediaries focused on five different areas; supportive housing for people with complex needs, long-term affordable homeownership, obesity prevention and better nutrition among youth, increasing youth literacy rates, and early childhood learning efforts. What each of the proposals have in common is that (1) they are all working to expand, replicate, or scale efforts in these areas and (2) their efforts are not constrained to one location, but will focus on a number of different locations across geographic areas. In addition, the funds awarded to these initiatives have to be matched twice, leveraging $2 in private funding for every dollar of federal funding.

This program seems to be pretty well aligned with the vision presented in Michelle Jolin’s articles. The Social Innovation Fund brings together support from both the public and private sectors to expand efforts that have already proven successful on a smaller scale. This is only the second year of the Social Innovation Fund. I will be interested to see how effective it proves to be in the long run at supporting initiatives that tackle important social problems.