The quality of nurturing and care a child receives during infancy and early childhood has profound and lifelong impacts on its health, development, well-being, and self-sufficiency. Social Innovation Fund (SIF) grantee Institute for Child Success (ICS) is exploring how to best ensure children from low-income communities have the supports they need for a strong start in life.
The Greenville, SC-based organization is a leader in Pay for Success (PFS) financing for early childhood programs. PFS is a contracting and financing model that leverages philanthropic and private dollars to fund services up front, with providers getting reimbursed after they generate results.
In 2014, the SIF awarded ICS a two-year, $782,000 Pay for Success grant to explore ways PFS could be used to improve outcomes for children and families and increase overall funding for effective early childhood programs. ICS is helping state and local governments in four locales examine the feasibility of using PFS mechanisms to fund early childhood programs. PFS-financed early childhood interventions could generate cost savings for governments, school districts, and others by decreasing the over-assignment of special education, public assistance, and other costly health and social services.
Through its SIF award, this past spring ICS selected four jurisdictions to receive PFS technical assistance:
- City of Spartanburg, SC
- Sonoma County, CA
- State of Connecticut
- Washington State Department of Early Learning and Thrive Washington
Over a nine- to 12-month period, ICS staff will train and mentor staff from those jurisdictions on how to conduct PFS analyses and build support for launching an early childhood PFS transaction. In addition, ICS has partnered with the Nonprofit Finance Fund to build PFS capacity among early childhood service providers at the Sonoma County project site.
Each of the four jurisdictions are focusing on a specific early childhood programming priority and implementing established and/or evidence-based early-intervention and early-education models such as the Nurse-Family Partnership, the Positive Parenting Program (Triple P), or high-quality preschool. Through their participation in the SIF, they will benefit from and add to effective practices for early childhood programming contributed by other SIF grantees and subgrantees that include the United Way for Southeastern Michigan and Mile High United Way.
Megan Golden, Senior Fellow at ICS, noted that a major early success story has been productive engagement with a cross section of partners in each of the jurisdictions. For example, the Connecticut project involves the Department of Social Services, the Department of Children and Families, and the Office of Early Childhood. As another example, the United Way of Greenville County, Greenville Health Systems, and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative have contributed funding to projects in South Carolina and elsewhere.
Golden also highlights the work ICS has done to help the jurisdictions it works with focus on assessing and understanding outcomes.
“We’re helping the public agencies to confront outcomes and find ways to measure them,” she said. “We’re encouraging them to determine what their outcomes should be and then to use existing information wherever possible to assess how they’re doing.”
Joe Waters, Vice President of ICS, adds that ICS’s coaching model includes a distinctive feature designed to build staff capacity: a jurisdiction receiving technical assistance must designate a staff member who can commit at least fifty percent of his or her time to working with ICS.
“This allows the ICS work to support, rather than distract from, a person’s responsibilities,” Waters said. “It also builds staff capacity to support other outcomes-based models for program delivery that might emerge in the future.”
By the end of its SIF PFS grant, ICS expects to have completed at least one PFS arrangement and to have contributed to an expanded body of knowledge and evidence for PFS concepts and efforts in early childhood intervention.
Additional information about ICS’s SIF project can be found online.