Social Innovation Fund Urged to Document Grant Decisions Better

Federal officials should do more to document how they decide which organizations get money from the Social Innovation Fund, a grant program to help nonprofits expand effective projects, according to an evaluation of the 2010 awards.

Congress and agency officials requested the study last year after a grant reviewer raised questions about one of the 2010 Social Innovation Fund awards and critics charged that the grant-selection process was too secretive.

The procedures used by the Corporation for National and Community Service, which manages the grants program, “generally appeared to be fair and objective,” said the report, which was prepared by the agency’s inspector general’s office.

But the corporation did not provide “sufficiently detailed documentation” about how it selected the 11 grant winners from a pool of 16 finalists, it said.

The corporation used a three-stage process involving both agency staff members and outside reviewers to award $50-million in 2010 grants to 11 organizations from an initial 54 qualified applicants.

The inspector-general’s office said it did not adequately explain its decision making during the final review stage.

Good documentation for the fund’s first year was particularly important because both Patrick Corvington, the former chief executive, and Paul Carttar, director of the Social Innovation Fund, had to recuse themselves because they had ties to groups that applied for money, it added.

In its response to the findings, the corporation said the “late stage” review process had a different function than the two earlier stages.

Rather than assessing strengths and weaknesses of individual applicants, it said, corporation staff members wanted to consider how to create “an overall portfolio of programs, taking into account such factors as coverage of the priority issue areas, geographic distribution of programs, and the extent to which programs would serve urban or rural areas.”

It said it brought the “same rigor and dedication” to that work as to the earlier reviews that passed muster in the evaluation.

The inspector-general’s office acknowledged that the agency had made efforts to document its final decisions in the 2011 grants that it recently awarded but said they did not go far enough. It called for procedures to require information about both successful and unsuccessful applicants.

The inspector-general’s office made several other recommendations for improving the Social Innovation Fund review process.

For example, it recommended that the agency improve the way it recruits reviewers, noting that 11 of them had Harvard University affiliations, which may have deprived the corporation from “obtaining a wider breadth of expert knowledge.”

The corporation said it agreed with those recommendations and had taken steps to follow them, and the inspector general’s office said it was satisfied with the response.

In a statement, the corporation said today that the evaluation showed that its grant-review process overall was “handled consistent with ethical standards,” adding that most of the technical recommendations for improvement had already been corrected.