As many of you already know, the Institute for Child Success recently received a major federal grant to help us improve early childhood outcomes.  Specifically, the Social Innovation Fund provided this grant so that ICS could help jurisdictions across the country scale up effective early childhood interventions using Pay for Success financing.  We are very excited about this opportunity.

Today, we announced details about the initiative and how it will proceed.  From today's release:

Technical Assistance: ICS will provide technical assistance to twelve jurisdictions across the country looking to develop PFS financing for early childhood interventions. Further, while ICS will provide guidance and assistance throughout the process, the jurisdictions themselves will conduct the feasibility studies and develop the PFS deals. As a result, staff in each jurisdiction will develop the expertise to carry forward any given project and, in later years, initiate new PFS deals. 

Convening: ICS will continue convening early childhood and PFS experts to promote collaboration and alignment in the early childhood PFS community. Much as we did with the J.B. Pritzker Children's Initiative and ReadyNation in March 2014, we plan to host annual PFS conferences for the early childhood community. We will also continue hosting smaller convenings on an ongoing basis. 

Information Sharing: ICS will share information and knowledge we develop through our work to benefit the field. All feasibility studies and reports developed through this process will be made publicly available through both ICS and the Social Innovation Fund.

We have submitted comments to the Congressional Record for the recent hearing about Pay for Success Financing and HR 4885.  We've heard from some folks, though, that the comments also provide a helpful primer for those who are relatively new to Pay for Success and early childhood.  From the comments:

Pay for Success financing is a model that can help scale-up effective interventions to improve outcomes for young children, while saving governments money... At its most basic level PFS involves four components:

• A program or intervention that has been tested, and has demonstrated that it produces desired outcomes and that its benefits exceed its costs;
• Investors that provide the upfront capital required to bring the intervention up to a larger scale;
• A government entity that agrees to repay the investor if the agreed-upon outcomes are realized; and
• An independent evaluator that determines whether the intervention accomplishes the pre-determined outcomes and, therefore, the government should make payments to the investor.

Because of the novelty and complexity of these arrangements, a third-party intermediary has also been involved in many of the Pay for Success contracts entered into to-date.

Congressional Action on Child Care Development Block Grant Reauthorization