CA Opportunity Zones: Guiding Principles on Outcomes & Metrics

Opportunity Zones are a community development program authorized by the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), with the goal of encouraging patient capital to invest in long-term community development projects. The federal legislation allows newly authorized Opportunity Funds to aggregate and deploy capital by investing a minimum of 90% of assets in designated census tracts and investment types. In return, investors in Opportunity Funds can defer, reduce and even eliminate their federal capital gains taxes after five to ten years of local investment. Read more about how Third Sector

Last month, the Empowering Families Learning Community co-hosted a webinar with Listen4Good, an initiative of the Fund for Shared Insight. This blog post highlights key learnings from the webinar and  opportunities for readers interested in building some of these best practices in their own context. Overview of Empowering Families: The Empowering Families Initiative is a [...]

This blog series is centered on Third Sector’s assessment and applicability of Pay for Success in higher education in partnership with a new cohort of stakeholders. This is blog post #1 of the series.   National Student Clearinghouse data reveal that while African American and Latinx students are enrolling in postsecondary institutions at similar rates [...]

This is the second in a series of blog posts that explore Third Sector’s progress in evaluating and redesigning our recruitment practices with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens.

Central to Third Sector’s role in the social services ecosystem is our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Before formally committing to using a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens to critically examine our culture, norms, and client-facing approaches, we had long recognized the importance of, and worked towards building, a more diverse team. In 2018, we wrote about our blind recruitment

This February, the Empowering Families Learning Community convened in Utah’s Wasatch Valley for the cohort’s sixth and final in-person meeting. The Empowering Families Learning Community participated in Sorenson Impact’s annual conference, The Winter Innovation Summit. In addition to participating in the broader conference, Third Sector also hosted a series of breakout sessions that reflected on the impressive work the Learning Community has accomplished to date. During these breakout sessions, Empowering Families sites heard from inspiring guest speakers who are implementing equity-driven and outcomes-oriented contracting strategies across their government agencies, and

With the recent release of the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) notice of funding availability, communities across the country are exploring opportunities to apply for the first-ever dedicated federal funding supporting outcomes contracting. While SIPPRA requires projects to focus on verifiable metrics across 21 priority issue areas, the particular metrics are quite flexible – and the 21st issue area gives communities considerable room for innovation. As a result, policy makers, agency leaders and community organizations are wrestling with which metrics to include in their applications for