Supporting Community Solutions

The Social Innovation Fund is an initiative of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) intended to improve the lives of people in low-income communities. It does so by mobilizing public and private resources to grow promising, innovative community-based solutions that have evidence of compelling impact in three areas of priority need: economic opportunity, healthy futures, and youth development.

The Social Innovation Fund employs an operating and program model that is itself innovative and truly represents a “new way of doing business” for the federal government. This model is distinguished by four key characteristics:

• Reliance on outstanding existing grantmaking “intermediaries” to select high-impact community organizations rather than building new government infrastructure.
• The requirement that each federal dollar granted be matched 1:1 by the grantees and again by their subgrantees with money from private and other non-federal sources, thereby increasing the return on taxpayer dollars and strengthening local support.
• Emphasis on rigorous evaluations of program results not only to improve accountability but also to build a stronger marketplace of organizations with evidence of impact.
• Effective leverage of the grant program through supplementary initiatives that advance social innovation more generally in the nonprofit sector.

The Social Innovation Fund was established in 2009 under the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.

Please visit the Grantees and Subgrantees page to learn more about the work of the Social Innovation Fund portfolio.

Click here to view the Social Innovation Fund fact sheet.

Announcing the 2012 Social Innovation Fund Grants Competition

The Corporation for National and Community Service will host a third competition for new intermediary grantees of the Social Innovation Fund this spring. A Notice of Funding Available (NOFA) will be posted to the CNCS Web site in early February. Applications will be due by late March.

When the NOFA is released, CNCS will also share details and provide technical assistance on how to submit a high-quality application. We encourage all grantmakers that are committed to expanding the impact of promising nonprofits implementing effective solutions to our nation’s toughest challenges to apply.