Federal Leader on Nonprofit Issues Tallies Accomplishments

Sonal Shah, the departing head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, says the job gave her “the best two and a half years in my professional career in a very long time” but that she wants a break.

“It was such a push to getting a lot of things done in a very short period of time,” Ms. Shah—a key Obama administration contact for nonprofit leaders—said in an interview. “It’s been huge, it’s been a lot of work, it’s been a lot of fun. But I wanted to move on and do something different.”

Ms. Shah, whose last day on the job is August 1, has led the office since it was created in 2009, working to promote issues that were priorities for both President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama—including expanding national-service programs and setting up a Social Innovation Fund to provide grants to help effective nonprofit groups expand their work.

Thanks to federal budget woes and the Republican takeover of the House last January, the mood in Washington has shifted sharply since the heady days after the president’s inauguration, when Congress quickly adopted the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act to achieve both of those priorities. This year, lawmakers cut the budget for the Corporation and National and Community Service, which runs both AmeriCorps and the Social Innovation Fund, by about 6 percent, to $1.08-billion, after the House tried to eliminate the agency entirely.

Despite the tough budget environment, Ms. Shah said President Obama, the first lady, and other high-ranking White House officials have “never flinched” from their commitment to national service.

“They said, We will be there supporting it no matter what,” she said. “It’s something we strongly believe in.”

She noted that President Obama proposed an increase in the national-service agency’s budget for 2012, despite calling for cuts in other federal programs.

The Social Innovation Fund won $50-million this year, the same as in 2010 (minus a 0.2 percent across-the-board cut that Congress imposed in its 2011 spending plan), an amount that must be matched by grant makers and nonprofits for a total of roughly $180-million in spending. Some critics have faulted the plan for its small budget, but Ms. Shah said its impact goes far beyond the dollars spent.

“Setting up the social innovation fund was huge—the amount of outreach that was done, the amount of input we took in creation of the fund,” she said. That led to many conversations about how to ensure the government is spending money on projects that can prove they are effective and how to measure results, she said.

The White House office has worked with other government agencies to encourage them to apply the “evidence-based” approach used by the Social Innovation Fund, she said. Other examples of that approach include the Education Department’s Investing in Innovation Fund and the Labor Department’s Workforce Innovation Fund.

“The most important thing we’ve seen is the conversation moving from [measuring] just the number of people served to the impact we can have—with funders, with corporations, with nonprofits, and among the government itself,” she said. “That is a much bigger scale than the fund itself.”

Ms. Shah’s resignation follows the departure of Patrick Corvington, former chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, who left at the end of May. Ms. Shah said the Presidential Personnel Office and others were “talking to many candidates about the position.”

Ms. Shah, former head of global development at Google.org, the search engine’s philanthropic arm, said she has no immediate career plans but will soon travel overseas to visit relatives. “I am literally taking off a minimum of three months,” she said, “and having no conversations about jobs.”