CFDA#
94.019
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Funder Type
Federal Government
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IT Classification
B - Readily funds technology as part of an award
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Authority
Corporation for National & Community Service (CNCS)
Summary
The mission of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering. Through AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and the Volunteer Generation Fund, CNCS has helped to engage millions of citizens in meeting community and national challenges through service and volunteer action. Through the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), CNCS has augmented its traditional activities with an enhanced focus on identifying and growing innovative, evidence-based approaches to our nations challenges.
The purpose of the Social Innovation Fund is to grow the impact of innovative community-based solutions that have compelling evidence of improving the lives of people in low-income communities throughout the United States. 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 Social Innovation Fund also generates broader impact by leveraging the grant program in various ways to improve how philanthropies, federal government departments and agencies, state and local government, and community-based organizations deploy funds to address social challenges. Additionally, it enhances the ability of the nonprofit sector to support the growth of innovative, high-impact organizations.
As one of the Presidents œtiered-evidence initiatives, the Social Innovation Fund embodies a commitment to use rigorous evidence to both select recipients of federal funding and to validate the impact of its funded program models. The Social Innovation Fund is driven by three core principles: (1) many of the most compelling solutions to persistent social problems in low-income communities are being developed in those communities and not in federal offices in Washington, D.C.; (2) significant impact can be generated for society by proactively identifying the best community-based solutions, strengthening their evidence base, and supporting the growth of their impact; and (3) the federal government can help drive social innovation by stimulating, focusing and enhancing public-private partnerships and cross-sector collaborations to grow the impact of the best community solutions.
History of Funding
None is available.
Additional Information
The following fundamental characteristics of the Social Innovation Fund form a unique grant program:
- The Social Innovation Fund competitively selects experienced grantmaking institutions (also called œrecipients) to do the critical work of identifying promising solutions (œinterventions) to community problems, and selecting high-performing nonprofit community organizations (œsubrecipients) on a competitive basis.
- Recipients receive between $1 million and $10 million per year for five years.
- Recipients award at least $100,000 annually to each subrecipient that they fund for three to four years.
- A majority of federal funds awarded to recipients must be invested in subrecipient programs.
- The interventions that are supported by the recipients must be innovative and evidence-based. Specifically, the Social Innovation Fund seeks interventions that have advanced beyond the beginning stages, are showing signs of effectiveness, and have the potential for greater scale. Larger programmatic and scaling dollars are awarded to programs that show higher levels of evidence, as defined in the Evidence and Evaluation section below, and have stronger capacity.
- Funded interventions must have at least preliminary evidence of effectiveness and then undergo rigorous, independent, formal evaluations, which substantively advance the sectors knowledge base.
- The Social Innovation Fund generates significant non-federal resources through a substantial match requirement at two levels. Each federal dollar granted by the Social Innovation Fund to the recipients must be matched one to one with cash from private and other non-federal sources. Similarly, grants from recipients to the subrecipients must separately be matched on the same one to one basis.
- With the support of the recipient, subrecipients grow their programs to make a deeper or broader impact in communities.
- And finally, in partnership with the recipients, the Social Innovation Fund engages in knowledge sharing through the documentation and dissemination of best practices and lessons learned.
There are two basic operational models of Social Innovation Fund projects:
- A œGeographically-Based Social Innovation Fund serves low-income communities within a specific local geographic area and focuses on achieving measurable outcomes in one or more of the Social Innovation Funds issue areas.
- An œIssue-Based Social Innovation Fund serves low-income communities in multiple geographic locations and focuses on achieving measurable outcomes in one of the Social Innovation Funds issue areas.