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Sharing What Works: Applications for the Social Innovation Fund

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 Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees the fund, said it would release the comments of reviewers and their ratings. It said it had planned the move before Mr. Light made his concerns public. It also said that all the winners went through more than one review process, so a bad rating in the initial round could be overcome later, and that all the winners received strong overall ratings.

To help shed light on the application process, The Chronicle has joined with Tactical Philanthropy, a blog written by the Chronicle columnist Sean Stannard-Stockton, to ask the winners and losers to allow us to post their applications online. We’ll post all we receive and encourage comments from readers.

If you would like to submit a proposal, send it to editor@philanthropy.com.

 

 

 

 

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One Response to Sharing What Works: Applications for the Social Innovation Fund

geri_stengel - August 23, 2010 at 12:08 pm

Thank you for giving us all this learning opportunity. Looking at applications of those that won — and those that didn’t — is will be instructive to both future SIF applicants and to nonprofits in general. As a reviewer, I realized early on that the process was avaluable experience for all of us.