Community Development Innovation Review

In the wake of an economic downturn, many cities are left with sites, projects, districts, or entire urban cores requiring redevelopment. The need for social improvements such as community centers, school rehabs, and parks has also become a critical development challenge. However, the ongoing risks of the development market require communities to be even more diligent and aware when entering into the use of public financing mechanisms such as Pay for Success (PFS) financing. One such mechanism, tax increment finance (TIF), has the potential to forge a new path for communities to fund development projects on the basis of their success.

Roca is currently negotiating with the Massachusetts Executive Office for Administration and Finance to establish one of the first Pay for Success (PFS) pilot projects in the United States.

In this article, I look at a path forward for one chronic condition, childhood asthma, and the potential for spreading this approach to the broader health system.

Pay for Success (PFS) has been touted as the hot new innovation in social investing. Over the past year, investors and governments across the country have committed millions of dollars to exciting new tools like social impact bonds (SIBs), which deliver a financial return only when specific social goals are met. But this approach is not new.

The concept of the “new normal” has infiltrated the thinking of policymakers, employers, and service providers. Brought about by demographic and technological changes, the new normal demands change: business as usual will no longer work.

In August 2012, Goldman Sachs Bank’s Urban Investment Group (UIG) announced the first social impact bond (SIB) in the United States, a $9.6 million loan it would make to support the delivery of therapeutic services to 16- to 18-year-olds incarcerated on Rikers Island.

Pay for Success (PFS) financing mechanisms, including social impact bonds (SIBs), provide opportunities for multiple stakeholders with different expertise—government, private investors, foundations, and service providers—to work towards common goals. For government agencies at all levels, PFS mechanisms create opportunities for the public sector to reward “what works” or expand access to evidence-based preventive social interventions without requiring taxpayers to shoulder all of the financial risk upfront. But in order for these new mechanisms to work, government must retain a central and important position.

Pay for Success (PFS), a form of social impact financing, is receiving international attention as a way to pay for scaling up high-return interventions, ranging from prisoner rehabilitation to infant health. It is attractive because risk of failure is shifted from taxpayers to the private sector; if programs don’t work, government doesn’t pay. Government pays for success by rebating a large portion of the savings from programs that work to private investors in those programs. If there are no savings, that is if interventions do not reduce government costs, there is nothing to rebate to investors. In this article, I review contracting and time-to-completion considerations with particular attention to feasibility studies, the critical first stage of establishing a social impact finance program.

Across the United States, a variety of social sector stakeholders are looking to “pay for success” (also known as pay for results or pay for outcomes) approaches to enhance the reach and impact of social programs.

For more than 100 years, philanthropy has taken risks other sectors either would not or could not take to advance innovations benefiting poor or vulnerable people.