Author Archives: Stacy Palmer

August 25, 2010, 5:00 pm

Social Innovation Fund: See Our New Section

The Chronicle has created a special blog on its Web site to track the Social Innovation Fund, the Obama administration’s $50-million effort to help charities with proven new approaches expand.

We’re using the new section to gather applications from groups that applied for money to the fund, in the hopes they will be instructive to many people in the nonprofit world. Please join the discussion and keep up with the Social Innovation Fund.

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January 28, 2010, 11:18 am

White House Aide Urges Foundations to Take More Risks

By Stacy Palmer

While President Obama was on Washington’s Capitol Hill reflecting on his first year in office during his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, another top White House official was in Los Angeles offering her views on the challenges for government, foundations, and other nonprofit organizations.

Sonal Shah, head of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, urged foundations to take greater risks, saying one of the lessons she learned in her first year is that the federal government is not easily able to finance experiments with new efforts to treat social problems.

“It’s hard to take risks when you have 535 board members,” she said, referring to Congress’s role in overseeing government spending.

She said we need some “creative destruction” to figure out what ideas were worth government investing in – whether it be to reduce child mortality, improve…