The Social Innovation Fund has concluded its second rigorous, highly competitive grant selection process and is pleased to announce that five outstanding intermediaries will be receiving awards.

Like the 11 organizations selected last year, these five represent experienced grantmakers with strong track records of success who have proposed compelling, innovative programs to tackle some of our country's biggest challenges in our most needy areas.

In addition, these organizations will supplement and strengthen our portfolio in key ways by adding diversity in terms of issues and geographies addressed and approaches embraced.

These new grantees include:

The awards total $13.9 million and will fund the initial two years of each grant, which address challenges in the critical areas of affordable housing, homelessness, obesity, early education, and literacy.

In addition, the SIF has provided continuation funding to nine of its 11 current grantees in accordance with the original terms of these investments and grantee progress to date.

FY 2011 Competition for New Grantees

Building on the 2010 competition, the 2011 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) sought the best proposals with a strong theory of change that would drive impact in low-income communities focusing on three issue areas: youth development, healthy futures, and economic development.

This year’s NOFO strove to make clear that only programs with preliminary evidence of effectiveness would be eligible for sub-grant funding support and that all programs would need rigorous evaluations to move the level of evidence towards strong. The match requirements were also stressed and, as with last year, all intermediary applicants had to demonstrate at least 50% cash match on hand at the time of application.

The Social Innovation Fund 2011 competition roughly mirrored the process established by the inaugural competition. This year’s competition incorporated some changes from the FY 2010 process. The following is a brief summary of the FY 2011 process. For more detailed information, see the Transparency for Impact page.

Summary of Applicants

In total, CNCS received 24 applications by the deadline of April 12, 2011. Six applications were found to be non-compliant with application guidelines based on an internal review. The remaining 18 organizations – requesting a total of $24.6 million in annual federal funding – entered the formal review process.

These 18 applications embodied active collaborations of more than 53 unique organizations or parties, including foundations, nonprofits, universities, and local governments. Of course, the Social Innovation Fund did not mandate these partnerships – rather, they developed because the parties saw collaboration with other capable organizations as a powerful way to amplify the impact of their work.

In addition, these proposals were well-balanced among the three targeted issue areas – economic opportunity (5 applicants), youth development and school support (8), and healthy futures (3). Two applicants addressed multiple issue areas. The applications came from 14 states, 10 of which are not represented by our current set of grantees. Seven of the 18 applications were from organizations that applied last year but did not receive funding.

• Applicant profiles for the 2011 SIF Competition (PDF)

Review Process

Applicants were assessed through a four-part review process that included:

• Internal Compliance Review: Applications are screened by CNCS staff to ensure they meet basic application requirements listed in the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO).
  
• External Expert Review: Unlike last year, the expert program and evaluation reviews occurred simultaneously as part of the same process. This means that every compliant application was reviewed by one panel of program reviewers and one panel of evaluation reviewers. Evaluation reviewers focus specifically on applicants’ use of evidence, data and evaluation, while program reviewers assess the remaining criteria for the application set forth in the NOFO. Twenty-eight recognized experts from the nonprofit, philanthropic and public sectors were engaged in this process.
  
• Internal/Staff Review: Based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative feedback from the reviewers, a subset of applicants entered the staff review phase. This year, applicants were reviewed by a panel of program staff reviewers. Senior staff reviewers were also convened to provide their perspective on the applications. These reviews assessed the applications based on program design, organizational capacity, and budget cost-effectiveness as well as applicants’ ability to add to the SIF’s existing portfolio. The Office of General Counsel was also engaged to help assess identified eligibility concerns.
  
• Clarification Stage: CNCS staff engaged in additional review and analysis to clarify items that were identified by expert and staff reviewers, SIF program staff, and the Office of Grants Management. Examples of such items include: requesting details around the sub-grant competition to ensure it would be open and competitive; clarifying evaluation plans to ensure rigor; and clarifying the role and capacity of identified program partners.
  
• Final Review and Decision: Using all review materials available including expert review scores and comments, program staff review scores and comments, senior staff discussion comments, clarification responses, and the applications themselves, the SIF team assessed applicants against the review criteria, balancing and additional considerations. Taking all review results into consideration, five applicants were judged to be superior in terms of the quality of their application, their contribution to the overall SIF portfolio, the unique contributions they can make to the social innovation field and, perhaps most importantly, the impact they can have on their communities.

Continuation Process

All 11 2010 SIF grantees submitted continuation reports which included updates on progress to date (focusing on subgrant programs and evaluation), challenges and how they were overcome, staffing changes, and requested budget changes. In determining potential recommendations for Year 3 funding, Social Innovation Fund program staff reviewed these reports along with submitted progress and financial reports to evaluate the progress each has made to date towards identified program goals. Based on this analysis, four grantees were determined to be well-positioned to accept Year 3 funding. They have made solid progress towards their program goals and have plans in place to utilize funding for Years 1 and 2 successfully.