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August 25, 2010, 5:56 pm
The final winning application of a Social Innovation Fund grant last month—that of the National AIDS Fund—has now been posted on the Corporation for National and Community Service’s Web site. The federal agency posted the other 10 applications over the weekend.
The AIDS group submitted its materials to the corporation on Tuesday, ahead of the agency’s August 27 deadline.
Kandy Ferree, the fund’s president, told The Chronicle that her organization was crafting a response that highlighted its concerns about the agency’s decision to make the applications public, even though it did not say it would do that when it requested proposals.
August 23, 2010, 3:00 pm
New Profit posted its application to the Social Innovation Fund on its Web site and also agreed to share it with Chronicle readers for comment.
You can read more about the controversy over the fund and the selection of New Profit in a Chronicle news article.
August 23, 2010, 3:00 pm
Moving to defuse a brewing controversy over how it awarded $50-million in Social Innovation Fund grants last month, the federal government has posted online the applications of the organizations that won the money, along with the ratings and comments they received from reviewers.
Read the entire Chronicle article on the controversy.
August 23, 2010, 3:00 pm
The Social Innovation Fund is an extremely ambitious attempt to help create a philanthropic capital market for supplying growth capital to high performing nonprofits, notes the Chronicle columnist Sean Stannard-Stockton in a new article.
The effort was almost derailed over the past few days, he writes, but quick action by the Social Innovation Fund has got things back on the right track.
Now it is up to the unsuccessful applicants to keep things moving in the right direction, he says. They were promised that their applications would not be made public. But voluntarily doing so now, with the encouragement of the fund, will cement the Social Innovation Fund’s commitment to transparency and help it reach its goal of broadly sharing knowledge about what works, he writes.
August 23, 2010, 12:00 pm
Social Venture Partners, one of the organizations that applied, but did not win any money, from the first round of competition for the Social Innovation Fund, has made available a copy of its proposal.
August 23, 2010, 8:00 am
The Corporation for National and Community Service, which promised Friday to post more materials from winning proposals to the Social Innovatin Fund, now has online the application materials from each proposal selected to receive aid, plus comments and ratings from reviewers.
Let us know what you think about the winners—and the federal agency’s response to the controversy over its openness about the grant-making process— by using the comment section below.
August 22, 2010, 5:45 pm
The controversy over the Social Innovation Fund’s review process has prompted one of the winners now under scrutiny—New Profit—to post its application online so everyone can see what it proposed to do.
Questions about New Profit and the other winners were set off Thursday when Paul Light, a prominent nonprofit expert, said that when he was judging the first round of applications, his committee of reviewers gave a low rating to one of the eventual winners. Mr. Light did not disclose the name of the organization that received a bad review but he described it as a group that had lobbied for creation of the Social Innovation Fund.
In today’s New York Times, New Profit is identified as the target of Mr. Light’s criticism. New Profit says it was aware it would face questions of favoritism so worked especially hard to shape an application that would succeed fully on its merits.
On Friday, the…