By Suzanne Perry

Patrick Corvington, the new head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, wants to help shift the conversation at his agency—and in turn among the nonprofit groups that get its money. Instead of measuring success by the number of volunteers they enlist to tackle a problem, he says, they should look at what impact those people are having.

“I want the corporation to be seen as, to become, a solution-centered organization,” says Mr. Corvington, who became chief executive of the national-service agency in February. A former senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who has specialized throughout his career in nonprofit management issues, Mr. Corvington describes his background as “results-oriented philanthropy.”

He adds: “I’d like to bring that culture here.”

Mr. Corvington presides over an agency of 600 employees that is in the process of a big expansion, thanks to the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, signed by President Obama almost one year ago.

The law aims to more than triple the participants in AmeriCorps, the flagship national-service program, to 250,000 by 2017. It also created several new programs, including the Social Innovation Fund, which will award $50-million in grants by July to help nonprofit groups expand effective social programs. President Obama has proposed increasing the corporation’s budget from $1.15-billion to $1.4-billion in 2011.

Fresh from 25 “listening tours” with agency staff members, Mr. Corvington says he would like to extend the philosophy behind the Social Innovation Fund­—spending government money on projects that can measure results­­—throughout the corporation.

“It means ensuring our grantees are not focused on numbers but on outcomes,” he says, “that as they work with the volunteers they’re engaging, they’re always having a conversation about not what did we do, or how many, but what difference did we make.”

He says the corporation is now developing a five-year strategic plan that will spell out how the agency can integrate that approach into its work.

'Room for Experimentation’

While much of the nonprofit world has accepted the need to focus more on impact, not everyone agrees on how to measure it.

Mr. Corvington—who was previously executive director of Innovation Network, a group in Washington that offers planning and evaluation tools to nonprofit organizations—acknowledges that the conversation is “tricky.” “You want to focus on what works, but you also want to leave room for experimentation,” he says. “We have to think through carefully how to do that.”

To help with the effort, the Serve America Act increased the corporation’s budget for evaluation projects, and the agency is also creating a new Strategy Office, Mr. Corvington says.

As an example of how an “outcomes-based” assessment might work, he says, a community-gardens project could measure its output by counting the number of gardens created, the number of people involved, and the amount of food produced.

But to measure outcomes, it would assess how many people developed healthier habits, or took up other “community-change” projects after working on the garden, along with whether the project prompted children to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Mr. Corvington says the corporation will soon announce some projects involving other federal agencies as part of its effort to promote itself as a “solutions” center.

He gave few details, but suggested one project would involve working with the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example by offering up AmeriCorps members to provide mentoring or other help to children of parents in military service.

Mr. Corvington took over the national-service agency after it had been without a permanent head for more than a year following the departure of David Eisner.

The agency still remains without a permanent board chair, and its bipartisan 15-member board is missing seven members. Mr. Corvington says he expects the president to nominate those members in the next few months, after which the board will elect a chairman (a spot has been filled on an interim basis by Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican).

A native of Haiti who grew up in Africa and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, Mr. Corvington says his own experience can serve as a model for one of his other main goals: to get a wider circle of people involved in national and community service.

“I always talk about my story, when I came here, working during the day, going to school at night, volunteering on the weekend,” he says. His mother was a day care provider, “always taking care of people around her in the community,“ he says. “We never saw ourselves as part of the service movement. It never occurred to us that existed.”

Innovation Grants

Mr. Corvington says the corporation plans to announce later this week how many groups applied for the social-innovation grants, which will provide $1-million to $10-million to “intermediary grant makers,” which will in turn provide grants to nonprofit groups for projects in economic opportunity, healthy living, or youth development.

The agency says more than 200 organizations wrote letters saying they intended to apply, but it has not yet given information about who they are or how many followed through. Mr. Corvington says the corporation will release the names in both groups after the grants are awarded.

The fund’s new director, Paul L. Carttar, presents the agency with a slightly sticky situation since he had served since 2008 as an executive partner at New Profit, a nonprofit group that provides money to innovative social projects­—and is among the organizations that have applied for a social-innovation grant. The corporation has said Mr. Carttar will recuse himself from discussions about former clients or employers during the grant-awards process.

Mr. Corvington says the agency thought carefully about what kind of person to select for the job and decided it needed someone who had experience in the kind of philanthropy the Social Innovation Fund seeks to promote. “We decided to err on the side of the best person who could get this done, and manage the recusal process as we went through,” he says.

He says the agency will conduct a “rigorous review process” of the grant applications, including outside reviewers, to ensure the selections are fair.

The reputation of the corporation, which has been criticized over the years for management problems by some members of Congress, “hasn’t caught up with the reality,” says Mr. Corvington.

The agency is strengthening its operations—for example, by carrying out suggestions offered by a management-consulting firm—and will have the money to make further progress if Congress passes the president’s proposed 2011 budget, which calls for extra spending on information technology and the grants-management system, he says.

Mr. Corvington has no experience managing a large agency. But, he says, “I’ve managed a variety of nonprofits that had tremendous challenges that I’ve turned around. It’s the same exercise, it really is.”

He adds: “If people are clear about what they need to do and you hold them accountable for that, whether you’re doing it with 10 people or a thousand people, that’s what you have to do.”