Social Innovation Fund to Release Details About Application Process Amid Questions

The Corporation for National and Community Service announced today it would release the comments and ratings that reviewers gave the 11 candidates that won Social Innovation Fund grants last month.

The move comes after a prominent nonprofit expert, Paul Light— who served as a reviewer for the fund—criticized the agency for “stonewalling” about how it selected the grantees and questioned how one applicant that his panel considered weak ended up getting money.

However, Ashley Etienne, a corporation spokeswoman, said the agency had been thinking about providing the information for a while as part of its “evolution to become more transparent.”

She said it had, for example, been eyeing the Education Department’s pilot project to post information about applications for its Investing in Innovation grants program.

Ms. Etienne said the ratings and comments, including those from the first phase of the process, would be posted next week on the agency’s Web site.

The corporation had already said it would post the winning applications for the $50-million in grants, designed to promote promising social projects, as soon as the organizations had an opportunity to edit out proprietary information. Ms. Etienne said those will be posted as they come in.