Third Sector Receives $2.4 Million Grant from Social Innovation Fund to Build Pay for Success Programs in Local Communities

Largest federal Pay for Success Round 2 grant will establish "Performance Hubs" and tools for communities to embed data analytics into service delivery programs for child welfare, homelessness, and juvenile justice services.

Third Sector is pleased to announce that it has received a $2.4 million federal grant from the Social Innovation Fund, a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service, to create a tech-enabled ecosystem of high-quality data for service providers and develop the pipeline of “Pay for Success (PFS)-ready” governments. The project is also funded by a $2.6 million matching funds from the University of Washington, which includes $2.4 million from The Ballmer Group Philanthropy and in-kind contributions from the University of Washington School of Social Work.

With this three-year grant, Third Sector will select five state and local governments in partnership with local research universities to create “Performance Hubs” – a localized effort to consolidate outcome data across child welfare, homelessness, and juvenile justice. The project will focus on more than 415,000 youth in low-income communities who are engaged in the nation’s child welfare system, and seek to build a tech-enabled ecosystem of tools to support outcomes-oriented government objectives for social services. Performance Hubs will facilitate real-time data feedback loops between local government and service providers to improve service delivery for youth in need.

“This project will help communities create essential ecosystems to provide for effective and efficient service delivery to vulnerable groups that needs consistent, high-quality attention,” explained Caroline Whistler, president of Third Sector. “We are grateful for the continued recognition by the Social Innovation Fund that outcomes-oriented projects can make real and lasting impact on communities.”

Third Sector will work alongside the University of Washington’s Partners for Our Children to deploy and install its university-based technology, Oliver Service Management Solution (“Oliver”), among the five selected government-university Performance Hubs. Oliver is a web-enabled data platform that collects and integrates client service history across multiple service providers, and supplies analytics capabilities to measure client outcomes and monitor provider effectiveness. Oliver’s solution goes beyond “data gathering” through its real-time integrative data capabilities with multi-stakeholder usage that is essential for any performance-based initiative. In the state of Washington, Partners for our Children has been directly involved in linking policy, research, data, and training within the child welfare system for over eight years. During this time, they have developed trusted frameworks and tools for service providers and government caseworkers to use data to learn and improve over time.

“I am very excited to work with Third Sector on this project because we see great potential for improving critical services to children and families in a number of our communities,” says Benjamin de Haan, Executive Director of Partners for Our Children. “Our technological expertise along with Third Sector’s track record with Pay for Success programs make us a very strong team.”

By implementing this infrastructure and providing technical support, Third Sector is readying communities to expand the pipeline of PFS-ready projects. This project will allow Third Sector to ignite a movement to transform universities into local data and performance resources  for service providers and all levels of government.

In early 2017, Third Sector will hold an open competition to select five government-research institution partnerships to receive up to $400,000 in both data readiness and PFS developmental technical assistance. Our goal is that the selected governments and performance hubs will become anchors for a local outcomes-oriented ecosystem that can provide the data access and integration, performance analytics, and user-friendly technology to underwrite performance-driven solutions. Information on how to apply will be posted on www.thirdsectorcap.org when it becomes available.