You Snooze, You Lose.

Often I feel that all of my blog posts have a similar theme, the inaction of the government in regards to innovation for our low-income communities.  This week is no different.

This year, I had the opportunity to work on the 2017 federal appropriations process for the United States House of Representatives.  I watched a number of programmatic funding requests pass my desk, requesting funds for after school programs, drug addiction intervention programs, and even illness awareness programs.  While all of these requests were programs fueled by passionate people with important causes, I knew that a large amount of those requests would not be met by the strained budget. 

This is the problem that we face; a large need, a strained budget, and a Congress that has not yet figured a method to impact issue areas beyond funding.  The larger problem is that while these issues still prevail, solutions are being designed that we refuse to adopt.  Initially while reading about Citi, the Acumen Fund and the Harvard Business review case, I felt an extreme sense of frustration that such amazing methods of progression were all centered on international ventures. While there are a number of issues abroad that deserve our attention and funding, I often question why that same attention isn’t given to those at the bottom of the pyramid in our American market. 

Our government can be so critical of new ventures, that we spend too much time debating the effectiveness and miss out on the opportunity for implementation. In the NPQ reading, the Utah School Readiness Initiative is mentioned, which is one of America’s first Social Impact Bond projects.  The article notes that the state government did not authorize funding for the deal, presumably because the SIB phenomena had not yet been proven to be effective. Over a year later, the Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post were all reporting the successes of the first Social Impact Bond.  Because the Utah state legislators did not pass the agreement, the success fell on United Way of Utah, which followed through with the agreement in the state’s place.

While this was a win for Goldman Sachs and even a win for the United Way, it was a loss for the Utah government.  The opportunity to experience the first success and set the trend in social innovation was lost, due to the government’s unwillingness to act on a low risk opportunity.  This is still the common theme from our state legislators to our Congressmen and Senators. 

What will it take to show our leaders that our BoP is suffering at the hands of inaction?  How can we encourage our officials to take risks in order to solve problems? Most importantly to me, how can we show officials the value in investing in Americas BoP in addition to international BoPs.