Crafting a Plan for Social Innovation

President Obama is starting to lay plans to carry out his campaign pledge to provide government help to innovative nonprofit groups that are working on the country’s most pressing problems.

One clue: The official White House Web site lists an Office of Social Innovation.

The office has not been publicly announced — and was apparently posted on the Web site prematurely — but people who advised Mr. Obama during the transition period say the president is committed to creating it, while also exploring how to structure a “social investment fund” to promote successful approaches to social problems and ways to get Americans more involved in their cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

Details are still sketchy, and transition advisers were reluctant to discuss in detail the proposals that they made, saying the administration’s staff and budget decisions were still in flux.

But some of the contours are starting to come into focus.

The decision to create a White House Office of Social Innovation is perhaps not surprising, given that one of its leading proponents — Michele Jolin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank — headed a group that advised Mr. Obama on “innovation and civil society.”

A White House office “would leverage the president’s platform to highlight the importance of relying on social entrepreneurs and nonprofits to solve social problems where both the private sector and government have failed,” Ms. Jolin wrote in the journal Stanford Social Innovation Review last spring.

The office, she added, would oversee efforts to direct government money to help nonprofit leaders experiment, expand approaches that work, and help charities collect data and evaluate whether they are making a difference. While President Obama proposed during the campaign the creation of a Social Entrepreneurship Agency in the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal national-service agency, Ms. Jolin argues that putting an office in the White House “elevates it as a priority.”

The White House could, for example, work with the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that “social innovation” priorities are reflected in the federal budget, and help expand projects that are successful in one government agency to others, she said in an interview.

Focus on ‘What Works’

The civil-society committee that Ms. Jolin headed was part of a larger transition group offering advice on technology, innovation, and improving government. It looked at ways to translate into action Mr. Obama’s pledges in areas like national service, volunteerism, and help for innovative nonprofit groups.

“We didn’t want innovation to be limited only to technology innovation,” says Sonal Shah, head of global development for Google.org, the search engine’s philanthropic arm, who was a member of the Obama transition project’s advisory board and co-chair of the technology working group. “Let’s not just make it innovation in terms of broadband or something like that, but also innovation in terms of what civil society is doing.”

Ms. Shah and her colleagues say they explored how government can provide money to results-oriented social projects, or “what works”; how to set up a social-investment fund; how government and nonprofit groups can join forces to achieve some of the president’s goals, such as weatherizing homes or closing education gaps; and how to use new technology to get more Americans involved in community-service projects.

Mr. Obama’s advisers also looked at ways to promote for-profit companies that have social missions, says another member, Howard W. Buffett, the grandson of Warren Buffett, the investor and philanthropist. “We want to encourage investment in that area and we want to encourage national standards,” he says.

Mr. Buffett — an adviser to the United Nations Office for Partnerships, which promotes alliances among the U.N., foundations, and businesses, and head of Cliffspringer, his own strategic-advisory group — joined the transition group after working full time on Mr. Obama’s campaign in Chicago.

He says he hopes to continue working on social-innovation issues in the Obama administration or elsewhere.

Other group members included Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, in New York, which provides fellowships to entrepreneurial nonprofit leaders; Jonathan Greenblatt, co-founder of Ethos Water, a company now owned by Starbucks that invests money in projects to bring clean water to countries that need it; Paul Schmitz, president of Public Allies, in Milwaukee, a group the trains young people for nonprofit and public-service jobs; and Marta Urquilla, policy director of the Praxis Project, in Washington, a group that provides training and other help to local nonprofit groups.

Setting an Agenda

The advisory group says it consulted a wide range of nonprofit, academic, and business representatives. Members who were interviewed say they presented options to the administration, not final decisions.

“We set the table so when there is a budget and the people, they can walk in and serve the meal,” says Mr. Schmitz, who worked with Michelle Obama, the first lady, when she headed a Public Allies office in Chicago in the 1990s.

Indeed, details remain cloudy about how the Office of Social Innovation and the social-investment fund will be structured, as well as who will head the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal national-service agency, and what role it will play.

President Obama has pledged that he will greatly expand the country’s national-service programs, and has endorsed the Serve America Act, a bill introduced in the Senate to accomplish that. The legislation would create “community solutions funds,” similar to the “social investment fund,” within the agency.

If a White House office is created, it “will have to shake hands in a big way” with the corporation, Mr. Schmitz says.

Another open question is what role Michelle Obama, who has said she will make national service one of her causes as first lady, will play.

White House spokesmen failed to return multiple e-mail requests and phone calls seeking information about the administration’s plans.

Transition advisers said decisions on social innovation and national service have been delayed partly because the administration is dealing with the economic crisis and working to fill critical positions in other areas. Some nonprofit groups are eager to get the administration’s new tools in place.

Irv Katz, president of the National Human Services Assembly, a coalition of charities, says he is excited about “the idea of acknowledging that nonprofit organizations, like the government, like the for-profit sector, play a very, very major role in addressing the needs of communities and society, but often don’t have access to R-and-D money, and to capital to expand programs.”

But not everyone agrees the administration should set up a new White House office. Creating a new structure sucks up time and resources that would be better spent reshaping the way the federal government spends money on social projects, says Brian Gallagher, president of United Way of America.

While he wasn’t consulted by the civil-society group, he said he got a good hearing from other parts of the transition team. He told them federal agencies must be forced to work together to “move money from existing programs into innovative programs.”

The goal, he says, should not be to promote particular nonprofit groups, but to achieve certain aims, like graduating more students from high school.

Promoting Volunteerism

The civil-society transition group’s most visible role came when it worked with the presidential inaugural committee to create a new tone for the annual day of service that marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which this year fell one day before the inauguration.

While the advisers wanted people to sign up for volunteer projects on the King holiday, they also wanted to set up ways to encourage them to stay engaged year-round — tapping into the energy that Mr. Obama generated in his campaign.

“There was something incredibly special in the campaign in using these new-media strategies to mobilize hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who had not been involved in the process before,” Ms. Dorsey says.

The inaugural committee set up a new Web site to allow people to list and sign up for volunteer activities, and President Obama made television and radio ads to promote it.

Mr. Buffett says the administration will now consider ways to take that concept to a new level, perhaps creating a technologically advanced “online service aggregator” to match people to community-service opportunities, possibly revamping the volunteer site operated by USA Freedom Corps, a group created by President Bush, he says.

Mr. Obama’s campaign promise to create a Social Investment Fund Network envisaged pairing government and private money to help nonprofit groups work on local problems and expand successful approaches to other regions.

The transition advisers explored a new twist to that proposal, Mr. Buffett says — finding ways for the government to promote innovative approaches by for-profit companies that work for the social good.

“Those policies right now don’t exist to encourage those types of corporate forms,” he says.

B Lab, a group that represents companies that meet certain social and environmental standards — or “B” corporations — submitted a set of proposals to the transition group. They asked, for example, that states create a new corporate entity that would be eligible for tax breaks and that government contracts give preference to socially conscious companies.

Now that the transition is over, the Aspen Institute, a think tank in Washington, has agreed to lead further discussions on issues like which federal body should house a social-innovation fund, Mr. Buffett says.