Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
[Updated, Jan. 11, 2014, 2:59 p.m. This article was updated to reflect the decision on Thursday by Rare and the Nature Conservancy to remain separate, independent organizations.]
It was 50 years ago that President Lyndon B. Johnson started the "war on poverty," railing against the "lack of jobs, bad housing [and] poor schools" that perpetuated an array of social crises, struggle and suffering amid a sea of plenty. Given the state of poverty today, it's tempting to believe that the effort was a failure, and that perhaps we may never prevail against these ills. But in many ways, we have become far more thoughtful and systematic in our efforts to address social problems. It's often hard to see these improvements. I spent time over the holidays checking up on organizations we've covered in Fixes over the past three years (far more relaxing than watching episodes of "Homeland"). I was struck by the steady progress most of them had made. And a few patterns jumped out. Here are three ways we may be getting smarter:
1. Getting real about what works and what does not. One of the most important trends among effective organizations is the rigor with which they're examining their own impact (and this includes the willingness to acknowledge failure). Unlike businesses, social organizations don't go bankrupt if they fail to produce results; they can plod along for years wasting time and money.
This is a heartening change. So what's driving it? Not just budget pressures, but the ability to access and process information at lower cost, the emergence of competing solution models and the recognition that many social programs have been disappointments. The push for more and better evidence of impact is vital if we are to learn, as a society, how to fix things that aren't working and allocate resources to greatest effect. I found numerous examples of organizations doing this well. Here are two:
Playworks, which I wrote about twice in 2011, works to foster safe and inclusive play opportunities in public schools in more than 20 states (it shows students and teachers how to make recess fun and healthy). In today's test-crazed culture, where every instructional minute is sacred, Playworks could easily be seen as a low priority. Why should a principal focus on recess when many kids are struggling to read?
When researchers from Mathematica Policy Research and Stanford University examined the program (pdf), they found something that many educators overlook: children's emotional and physical well being is intimately connected with their cognitive development. When kids have a good time playing with other kids at recess, it has a positive impact on the rest of their school day. Teachers in schools with Playworks reported 43 percent less bullying. They found that kids felt safer. And they reported having to spend a third less time helping kids transition into learning routines after recess. Equally important for Playworks, the study revealed where the implementation of its program was strong, where it was weak, and how it could be improved.
Another organization that has put a lot of thought into its impact evaluation is Blue Engine, which works to increase college readiness through a team-teaching model in high school classrooms. One common method of measuring impact is to compare performance among students receiving an intervention to students from comparable schools. In this case, it was more complicated. Blue Engine requires an unusually high investment from a school so the presence of the program can be taken as a sign that the school has distinctive leadership.
Instead, the organization worked with GlassFrog, an evaluation firm to devise an algorithm (pdf) to estimate how students would have performed on New York State Regent exams without its help. They found that that the equation predicted with better than 80 percent accuracy which students would attain "college ready" levels for algebra and geometry (it was slightly less accurate for English). Not only did the analysis reveal that the program increased the number of students scoring at "college ready" levels on the Regents exams by 61 percent, but as with Playworks, it showed where the model was faring best and where it was faring worst. That's essential feedback for improvement.
2. Paying for success (and prevention). One reason organizations are doing more to examine their impact is that foundations and governments are increasingly demanding it, and in some cases making payments contingent on performance. My colleague Tina Rosenberg reported in 2012 on the first "social impact bond" in England. Since then, with the support of organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, Social Finance and Third Sector Capital Partners, these bonds – financial instruments in which investors are repaid based on the success of the social programs that they fund – have gained traction in a variety of locations across the United States.
In December, New York State launched a $13.5 million social impact bond, financed by private and institutional investors, to pay for training and employment services for 2,000 previously incarcerated individuals. The deal is that investors get repaid, and earn returns, only if the program achieves specified reductions in recidivism or gains in employment (which would produce large savings for the state). In the coming months, Massachusetts is expected to launch a pay-for-success project aimed at helping youths who are aging out of the juvenile justice system.
President Obama requested $300 million in the 2014 Budget for an Incentive Fund to help state and local governments implement pay for success projects. And this summer, the White House reiterated its push for rigorous evidence to drive government innovation in a memo to the heads of all departments and agencies (pdf).
What's most noteworthy about this approach is that, if it works, it creates incentives to finance prevention – the smartest and usually the cheapest way to address problems, but also the hardest thing to get governments to pay for. (Program costs are incurred immediately, but savings often accrue on someone else's watch.)
One limitation is that the successes that are easiest to connect to savings are those that address problems that are already advanced, and therefore difficult to solve. A program aimed at ex-offenders is considered highly successful if it cuts the recidivism rate from, say, 70 to 60 percent. If society intervenes earlier – say by preventing or buffering "toxic stress" in early childhood — the gains for society could be considerably greater. But the pay back period would be longer and the savings much harder to estimate.
It's yet to be seen how well social-impact bonds will work and how much attention they will attract beyond social-purpose investors. This year marks their coming out in the United States.
There are, of course, many barriers involved in getting governments to fund things based on rational considerations. Politics cannot be divorced from favoritism anymore than bureaucracies can be released from rules — so there will always be pressures and restrictions that give preference to lackluster performers over innovators. Moreover, many social organizations lack the resources to produce evidence that would help them attract growth funding, a classic Catch-22.
One idea being advanced by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy is to demonstrate how to design low-cost randomized controlled trials using data that is readily available. It's often assumed that these studies, considered the gold standard in research, must be expensive. However, the coalition has gathered a range of examples where people have constructed them on a shoestring (pdf). Recently, it launched a competition to finance and showcase this approach. The winners and finalists will participate in a workshop co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
3. Getting change into the water supply: The social sector has been described as a cottage industry — with lots of small nonprofit organizations, but relatively few that achieve major scale. It's impossible to grow big without large sources of capital, like those most commonly available to companies. But growing big isn't the only way to have major influence. Here are some of the ways that groups are trying to ramp up their impact more quickly:
Last September, Rare, an organization that pioneered an effective and replicable methodology for organizing "Pride Campaigns" to galvanize community conservation efforts, announced plans to merge with the nation's largest conservation organization: the Nature Conservancy. Mergers are hard to make work, and this one ultimately didn't; the two groups decided to remain separate, independent organizations, but they are exploring ways to collaborate, share knowledge, and even raise money together. Ideally, Rare will be able to take its approach to a wider platform, while the Nature Conservancy is likely to benefit by absorbing the know-how of a smaller group that has developed a social technology that complements its current work.
In another important partnership announced in October, Youth Villages, one of the nation's leading organizations providing assistance to youths and families involved in the foster care system, will work alongside the state of Tennessee to provide transitional living assistance for every 18-year-old who ages out of the state's foster care system and needs this kind of help (the first time a state has provided such assistance for all youths). Research indicates that a young disconnected person who leaves foster care at 18 is at high risk for homelessness, early parenting, unemployment and criminality. However, Youth Villages reports successful outcomes with more than 80 percent of youth it helps. (It is currently undergoing a longitudinal impact study.)
Some other examples:
- The Myelin Repair Foundation formed partnerships with Biogen, Gencia and Bionure, drug development companies, to license laboratory models and collaborate on the development of therapeutic compounds for myelin repair, with the hope of advancing a cure for multiple sclerosis.
- The Interfaith Youth Core, which cultivates interfaith leaders on college campuses, is bringing together representatives from 40 universities to advance the development of a new academic field: interfaith studies.
- First Book now provides discounted or free books to children in need through 90,000 classrooms and nonprofit programs, double its reach from the same period last year.
- Mosaic, which began crowd-sourcing solar energy installation last January, became the first company to use this model to help finance installations on United States military housing.
- The Rapid Referral approach, which makes treatment a condition of release for low-level offenders with substance abuse problems and produces a significant drop in recidivism, is under consideration by Vermont's legislature and human services agency for statewide adoption.
- Jim Thompson, founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance, gave an extraordinary TEDx talk highlighting the crucial difference between professional and youth sports.
- Jill Vialet, founder of Playworks, somehow found time to author "Recess Rules," a book for children and youths about a group of friends who rescue recess in their school. I've been reading it to my 10-year-old son, and it's been making us both laugh out loud.
Happy New Year!
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David Bornstein is the author of "How to Change the World," which has been published in 20 languages, and "The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank," and is co-author of "Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know." He is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems.
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