To start, there was the Obama Administration’s commitment forging a new role for government, which was evident in her words.  As Ms. Obama put it at one point: “With a little nudge from government and a lot of private investment, we can create a powerful new model for making change in our communities.”  This is the vision that many of us, including Root Cause through its Public Innovators initiative, have been working to realize in recent years.  We are finding a middle path between the two ideologies that have dominated political rhetoric over the past several decades: that of the FDR-styled ‘government-as-service-provider’ on the one-hand and the Reagan-inspired ‘government-is-the-problem’ on the other.  That new way of operating – in which government plays a role in orchestrating cross-sector approaches to creating social impact – is still taking shape.  But initiatives like the Social Innovation Fund are providing hopeful glimpses of what it will look like.

In addition, yesterday’s event helped to reveal a new path forward for another key stakeholder in the future of social problem solving: our nation’s foundations. Ms. Obama’s remarks called attention to two important and complementary roles that government and foundations can play by partnering together.  While government can help to facilitate collaboration from the top down, foundations can help ensure that the ideas we encourage and ultimately spread come from our local communities. Deeply entrenched in the communities in which they operate, foundations already know the needs and some of the best solutions to addressing them.  By recognizing the need to direct resources based on results and fostering the continual creation of new ideas in their communities, foundations can play an essential role in bringing about healthy social impact market that fosters innovation and directs resources for solving social problems based on performance.

It was clear yesterday that a new generation of leaders at our nation’s foundations is poised to meet this challenge. A letter of support submitted immediately after the First Lady’s remarks by the Council on Foundations on behalf of many of our country’s community foundations impressively summarized the opportunity: “We know that to make progress on our challenges, we need to find and support the best, most promising ideas and enlist all parts of our communities in implementing these solutions. We also know that with the right resources, the right partnerships, and the right collaborations, we can develop new solutions that can be replicated and moved to other communities to address their needs.”

Yesterday’s event at the White House, I believe, brought us one step closer on our journey toward a more effective, twenty-first century approach to today’s social challenges. We are beginning to speak the same language about finding and spreading solutions and making investments based on results.  We are beginning to see the variety of roles that need to be played in order to align and amplify existing efforts to solve social problems. Of course, the road ahead is still long, but yesterday left me feeling hopeful and energized for what will come next.

The compact is an exciting and necessary step toward bringing the nonprofit, philanthropic, business, and government sectors together to move the bar on pressing social issues in the areas of economic development, education, the environment, health and health care, and youth, family, and elderly issues. In an op-ed I wrote in the Boston Business Journal almost a year ago calling for an Office of Social Innovation in the Massachusetts, I said that, too often, innovative and proven approaches already operate in our communities, but are not given the support they need from government. The state has the potential to help the promising ones extend their reach and have far greater impact by putting new policies, systems, and resources into place.

Here is what the compact commits the administration and the nonprofit sector to do:

The Commonwealth has agreed to:

• Welcome social innovation organizations with vision and experience in improving the lives of citizens
• Initiate a conversation with providers on the potential for unprecedented action and new approaches on infrastructure and government operations
• Commit to exploring the application of new, results-driven solutions to persistent problems that have gone unsolved despite repeated efforts and partnerships
• Explore new opportunities to take better advantage of locally cultivated talent directed at educating and caring for residents
• Provide new supports to promote the work of social innovation partners to reach a larger group of residents in need of assistance

The Social Innovators have agreed to:

• Engage in an active problem-solving dialogue with the leaders of state government
• Provide consulting services to government agencies to build the Commonwealth’s portfolio of social innovation initiatives and reach more residents
• Supply support, guidance and management for select projects based on the needs of residents
• Serve as a central point of contact for all potential national and local social innovation initiatives
• Channel information to the Governor and his cabinet regarding opportunities for Massachusetts on these opportunities as appropriate

There are many examples of the nonprofits that would be able to do much more with such support. Year Up has developed an exciting and successful training program for urban young adults to close the opportunity divide by providing them with professional skills, college credits, and corporate internships. Strong Women, Strong Girls, a program founded by a visionary college student, uses the study of female role models and a creative mentoring program to build self-esteem and leadership skills among at-risk girls in grades 3-5.

In our work at Root Cause, we have identified many more examples of organizations with promising new ideas through our Social Innovation Forum. Our recent reports on school readiness and the best organizations working on the issue in MA have inaugurated a new methodology for using data to find the highest-performing organizations with proven approaches to their social issue. And our partner in today’s signing at the State House, New Profit Inc., is supporting a portfolio of leading nonprofits that are working to dramatically improve opportunities for children, families, and communities.

Today is just a beginning. There is much more for all of us to do to leverage the work of these organizations to better address every Massachusetts resident’s basic needs. I applaud Governor Patrick for having the vision to play a leadership role in that work.

Landrieu’s job will not be an easy one, to say the least. As we approach the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans still faces many of the challenges that the destruction of the city exposed and exacerbated. Add to that the burden of our nation’s current economic situation, and New Orleans appears as a microcosm of the United States and the issues we are currently confronting. When Landrieu walks into New Orleans City Hall, he will encounter, on the city level, a similar situation to that which President Obama found when he took office.

There are a number of reasons to be hopeful about what Landrieu can do. First, the overwhelming victory of the first white mayor in 30 years in a city where 67% of the population is black suggests that New Orleans is moving past the racial divisions that it has experienced in recent decades. Landrieu and the city’s population appear eager to work with leaders representing all backgrounds and colors to build a better New Orleans.

Additionally, the election of Landrieu provides an important opportunity to see up close how forward-thinking government leaders throughout the United States are taking on new roles in order to move the bar on our most pressing challenges in economic development; education; the environment; health and health care; and youth, family, and elderly issues. Landrieu represents this new breed of government leader who is taking bold steps to identify and help to spread the most effective, efficient, and sustainable solutions to social problems. Through the Office of Social Entrepreneurship that he founded while serving as the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Landrieu has demonstrated a commitment to ensuring that government resources for solving social problems go to organizations with proven results, facilitating public-private partnerships that maximize resources for addressing social problems, and creating a policy environment that encourages social innovation. Last April, we awarded the then Lieutenant Governor the first Root Cause Public Innovator Award precisely for this new style of leadership and his practical approach to the state’s social problems.

Now, as New Orleans enters a new chapter in its efforts to rebuild after Katrina, it is time for the nation to re-engage with New Orleans as well. With its new mayor, New Orleans is poised to provide us with a great American story of a city that pulled itself out of a state of dismay and distress to become a shining example of American social innovation. And that story will include many crucial lessons for other American cities as well.

This Saturday’s election in New Orleans features the latest in a string of campaigns in which a candidate’s core messages include social innovation or civic engagement. Lt. Gov. Landrieu, for whom this is a third attempt at New Orleans’ top spot, established Louisiana’s Office of Social Entrepreneurship – the first such office in the nation. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, they revealed the existence of successful approaches that that people of Louisiana had already been testing, as well as a need to bring successful models from elsewhere to fill in gaps. The lieutenant governor realized, however, that there was currently no good way for the government to facilitate the efficient spread of these ideas, efforts, and resources. Having the foresight to see that government could play a major role in effectively channeling these efforts and giving social entrepreneurs the skills they needed to give their ideas the best chance at having significant impact, the lieutenant governor founded the Office – and it has served as an example to many similar efforts around the country as more and more officials realize their own potential to facilitate the spread of enduring social impact. To learn more about the lt. governor’s social innovation agenda in Louisiana, you can watch him speak about the work at an event at the Aspen Institute and listen to a discussion between the two of us at the 2009 Social Enterprise Summit.

But Mitch Landrieu is not the only one who has put social innovation front and center. Paul Thissen, a state representative who is running for governor of Minnesota, has just introduced legislation that supports “innovation and multi-sector collaboration,” potentially opening new doors for cross-sector partnerships to accelerate social problem solving in that state. Alan Khazei, who ran for the senate seat left vacant by the death of Senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, ran on the platform of “Big Citizenship” and was significantly buoyed by supporters of his work at City Year and the example it has set for national service. And Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello has been recognized for his focus on social entrepreneurship and lists “service” squarely on his Issues and Legislation page.

I’ve been excited to notice that this message is being repeated more and more frequently as many of us work together to spread a social innovation agenda across sectors and social issues. Candidates are beginning to use it as a differentiating message that has the potential to cut through the clutter and win elections because they know that citizens are disillusioned by the gridlock and stagnation they are used to seeing at all levels of government. As candidates search for ways to resonate with voters that are practical and solution-oriented, they increasingly see social innovation as part of that story.

I wanted to share some quick observations, and will offer more thoughts in the near future. My initial reactions:

1. The Corporation and the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation did an incredible job gathering viewpoints from so many different people and perspectives. It is clear that a great deal of thought was put into this document.
2. The awards are stated to be “in the approximate amounts of $5 million to $10 million to approximately five to seven intermediary organizations.” Because of the size of the awards, the one to one cash match, and the limited number of recipients, fewer organizations will be eligible to apply to the Fund than many had hoped for. While this may be a disappointment to some, it does show a commitment to demonstrating to Congress and the country that success the first time out of the gate is a priority (and is more likely given the limited number of awards) − and in the long run, hopefully this will allow for growth of this and similar programs in the future. This was, I am sure, a tough decision, but in the end seems like the right one.
3. Lastly, it appears that the Fund will promote a very thoughtful, rigorous, and most importantly, innovative approach to government investment in promising nonprofit solutions that will serve as an excellent resource for other government agencies to learn from. This is, I believe, one of the most important aspects of the Fund as we look to it to catalyze and spread this kind of thinking throughout city, state and federal levels of government.

Please note, the public comment period closes on January 15th!

We hosted the event because we wanted to broaden the conversation and educate people in the federal government about the importance of social innovation. We were fortunate to have an exciting group of attendees, including the recently appointed head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Patrick Corvington, Mike Firestone from Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s office, Jim Fruchterman from Benetech, and Bill Strathman from Network for Good.

We opened the morning with a welcome from Virginia Congressman Jim Moran and an introduction from myself, and then heard from a panel of social innovators followed by a panel of government leaders. You can listen to audio from the event by clicking on the session links below:

Session 1:

My introduction (click here to read my remarks)

Opening Remarks from Virginia Congressman Jim Moran

Social Innovators Panel: Keith Artin, the COO of TROSA; Marcia Kerz, president of OASIS; Ellen Lawton, executive director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership; and Terri Steingrebe, Bonnie CLAC’s CEO, discussed the critical role that government can play in furthering their work, the barriers they face, and what government can do to accelerate their impact.

Session 2:

Government Leaders Panel: Chris Campbell, Sen. Hatch’s legislative director; Judy Reese Morse, Louisiana Lt. Governor Landrieu’s chief of staff; Peter Frosch, Rep. McCollum’s legislative director; Brian Van Hook, the senior policy advisor to the Senate Small Business Committee/Sen. Landrieu’s office; Marta Urquilla, the Senior Advisor for Social Innovation from the Corporation for National and Community Service; and Shivam Mallick-Shah, the Director of Special Initiatives for the Office of Innovation & Improvement at the Department of Education, gave their perspectives from Congress, federal agencies, and at the state level on what must be done to accelerate social innovation with government’s support.

For me, there were a couple of really critical takeaways from the event:

• We have to find a way to turn the conversation from the few to the many. Although this work is getting a lot of attention right now, the reality is that only a few members of Congress and government agencies at the city, state and federal levels are championing this work. We must convince people from agencies and in elected offices that this work is important.
• We need to clarify exactly what we’re working toward: the better mousetrap. We have to work hard not to get caught up in our own jargon, and to simplify the message about how what’s different here could make real change. When we lead off with “social innovation,” it often falls on deaf ears. How do we refocus and emphasize that this is about social needs and addressing problems in a different way, and communicate that we are really talking about improving people’s lives?

I especially encourage you to listen to the panel featuring government leaders. I believe it is the first time that representatives from Congress, government agencies, and a state have come together to share their viewpoints about social innovation. They each had very different perspectives on both why and what needs to be done to continue the work, and I know I learned a lot from the conversation. I hope you will too.

You can also see clips from the panels and video interviews with various attendees on Root Cause’s YouTube channel.

Photo by banna123456 via flickr

As the Corporation for National and Community Service prepares to release its guidelines for public comment, there continues to be more and more activity on this issue bubbling up at city, state and federal levels.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Louisiana’s Office of Social Entrepreneurship to meet the 12 social innovators that the Office is supporting in an effort to identify and spread promising models, while some of my colleagues from Root Cause visited the OneStar Foundation’s Texas Social Innovation Initiative, which also just launched a program to do very much the same.

The Conference of Mayors recently announced a “Cities of Service” coalition, championed by Mayor Bloomberg of New York City and assisted by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to support and engage mayors that want to emphasize service, as outlined in the Serve America Act, in their cities.

And, the new edition of Philanthrocapitalism, a great book by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, points out that the work happening at the federal level in the Office of Social Innovation and the Department of Education, among other things, demonstrates the Administration’s grasp of the importance of social innovation to our nation’s success.

Perhaps most exciting, from my perspective, was a recent convening at the Capitol (which I will share more about in a future post) hosted by Root Cause’s Public Innovators initiative. The event had three goals:

1. Further the conversation about advancing social innovation throughout the federal government.
2. Educate federal government officials and staffers about how to best address the issues they care about by partnering with social innovators, and offer recommendations on how this can best be done.
3. Create a space in which to engage in substantive dialogue between innovators and government so that those in the room come to see each other as resources and partners.

There was an amazing collection of government leaders there: Congressman Jim Moran from Virginia, Congressional staffers (Chris Campbell from Sen. Hatch’s office, Peter Frosch from Rep. McCollum’s office, and Brian Van Hook from the Senate Small Business Committee/Sen. Landrieu’s office), Marta Urquilla from the Corporation for National and Community Service, Judy Reese Morse, Louisiana Lt. Governor Landrieu’s chief of staff, and Shivam Mallick-Shah from the Department of Education, all heralded this new way of solving old problems. Nonetheless, it came through clearly that these government leaders are heeding the warning that the enthusiasm of the few must move quickly to the many, and that we must begin to demonstrate success.

The challenge is, of course, that demonstrating success quickly will be difficult. We must find ways to move the agenda forward not only by clearly defining what success looks like, but also by bringing many efforts and approaches to the table. We need to test a variety of ideas so that each can offer lessons to the others and, if one is proven inadequate, it will not delegitimize the entire agenda. This will take unprecedented leadership, such as we have never seen, that puts an emphasis on collaboration as we all continue to prioritize our own sustainability. The inflection point, as we enter 2010 – a year some say will be even more challenging for the social sector then last year – is clear. The question is, how will we respond?

Photo by jonas maaloe via flikr

While I absolutely hear your points, I remain committed to my claim that Ms. Rhee is a public innovator. The D.C. public schools are notorious for failing to prepare their students for success. The study that Richard cited in his comment notes that D.C. students scored lower than students in most other urban districts on a nationally administered test; in addition, D.C. students have historically fallen far behind the average of their peers nationally in terms of high school graduation and post-secondary graduation, and have been much more likely to be unemployed. When one considers that D.C. spends more than all but two states per student on public education, and nearly $5,000 more per year than the national average, these shortcomings seem even more poignant; it seems clear that D.C. hasn’t had anything like an ‘invest in what works’ mindset in the past that could benefit students. Students and parents have begun to flow out of the school system, presumably because they were fed up with the status quo, and into charter schools and other types of schools. Given this information, and the state of affairs when Ms. Rhee was named chancellor, it seems hard to imagine that she could really do more damage to students on a macro scale than has already been done. For decades, children have received atrociously sub-par education in the DCPS, and their parents have often lacked recourse to address the situation. Michelle Rhee decided that somebody had to do something about it.

After years of failure at DCPS, it seems the least we can do is give her a full chance to demonstrate the value of her decisions. It’s extremely challenging to assess impact on social issues, as we all know, and expecting her to have turned around the lumbering ship of public education in less than three years is, frankly, unreasonable.

While I am certainly not asserting that her approach is perfect or even close to proven yet, the fact that she is putting a stake in the ground about the dire need to do things differently makes me want to hang on and see what comes out of it. Innovation drives change; it’s what this country is built on! No, the strategy and implementation plans are not fully in place, and yes, she has burned many bridges with her tactics. Nevertheless, it seems that without such a radical approach, change on any notable scale would probably be impossible to achieve. The option of continuing with the schools as they were would have been, to me, the work of yet another government official who tiptoed around the edges until her tenure was complete. While we wait for more evidence of results, we should see if she continues to refine her thinking in any way. A big part of successful social innovation is continuous improvement, informed by data.

I hope that Michelle Rhee continues to improve her practices and further adopt the principles of public innovation. For now though, I think she is someone we can look to as we consider how to break with inherited traditions of bureaucratic inertia and move toward thinking about government as a catalyst for and investor in finding and supporting solutions that work.

I recently read Tom Friedman’s op ed piece entitled “The New Untouchables,” which inspired me to start off with Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools. Before I tell you a bit about why I think Rhee is a public innovator herself, let me provide some general principles that a public innovator embodies and that I think are essential to advancing social innovation:

The public innovator:

1. Encourages social innovation: Public innovators can encourage social innovation and help spur the testing of promising new approaches to solving social problems.
2. Fosters a supportive policy environment: The very nature of innovation means that social entrepreneurs will be heading into new territory, and they often encounter unexpected barriers along the way. Public innovators can lift such barriers. In addition, merely by lending credibility and drawing attention to a given issue or initiatives, they can help proven models gather momentum.
3. Rewards initiatives for exceptional performance: Access to reliable sources of funding is essential to the growth and sustainability of solutions that work. By tying decisions about funding and purchasing to performance, government can help ensure that solutions that work will sustain and grow their impact.
4. Spreads successful approaches: Expanding the reach of a proven solution is often critical if the solution is to become truly transformative. Yet acquiring the recognition, support for spreading, or funding to scale a successful initiative is notoriously difficult. Government can play a crucial role in expanding the reach of solutions that work by seeking out what works and enabling solutions to spread.
5. Produces knowledge to understand performance: Government already serves as a critical source of data and standards. Public innovators can play a critical role in ensuring that knowledge is produced, more clear standards are set, and data is easily accessible.
6. Catalyzes public-private partnerships across sectors: Public leaders who leverage the many resources available across all sectors – and succeed in bringing various stakeholders to the table in order to advance effective solutions – can have an impact much greater than any solution focused solely on one institution or sector.

A public innovator must be able to work towards these principles in the face of tremendous obstacles, including but not limited to entrenched bureaucracy, partisanship, systems that are stuck in old, ineffective ways of approaching issues, term limits, and more.

You may be asking, why is it that I keep talking about government on this blog? It’s because I am convinced it is the only path to making systemic change on the many social issues we must address. As I noted in my remarks at the Social Enterprise Summit this year, it’s the better mousetrap, and we need to capitalize on it before the opportunity passes us by.

To build off that point, let’s turn back to Rhee. As chancellor of D.C. public schools, she has authority over 144 schools serving 46,000 students; her decisions immediately affect students and the city on a scale almost unheard of in the nonprofit sector. In addition, her approaches can have a spread effect because bold actions, for which she is well known,  attract media attention, and other superintendents can learn from and model their decisions after hers.

OK – so what has she done to improve the schools in our nation’s capital?

I saw Rhee speak earlier this year at the Gathering of Leaders, and I recall thinking that she is hitting the mark on the attributes of a public innovator. For starters, she has consistently sought the highest performing nonprofits in D.C. and partnered with them to bring their approaches to under-performing schools [(4) Scale successful approaches and (6) Catalyze public-private partnerships]. She is leading the charge on one of the most ambitious set of contracts ever for teacher unions to try to ensure that high-performing teachers are rewarded [(2) Foster a supportive policy environment and (3) Reward exceptional performance]. She has also been a huge proponent of charter schools [(1) Encourage social innovation], and she is a zealot about using and reporting on data [(5) Produce knowledge to understand performance].

Friedman points out in his op ed that, thanks to the changing nature of our economy, schools have the “doubly hard task” of “not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” – so someone in Rhee’s position needs to go beyond just getting students’ basic academic skills up to par. As Friedman notes, “We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.” Michelle Rhee understands that the status quo, when proven ineffective, needs to be shown the door, and that tough and unpopular decisions must be made in the face of inertia and adversity. She is a true public innovator.

Photo by The National Academy of Sciences via flickr