White House Office of Social Innovation AND Civic Participation?

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: social innovation fund

Published May 07, 2009 @ 01:01PM PT

The Obama family volunteering

There's been a huge amount of buzz in the social entrepreneurship world this week about the Social Innovation Fund, a new $50 million fund to "identify the most promising, results-oriented non-profit programs and expand their reach throughout the country." A subtle but important shift in the name of the office that will be in charge of the Fund, however, has largely flown under the radar.

According to the White House press release, the Fund will be connected to the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation (emphasis mine). The release characterizes the office in the following manner:

The White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation will coordinate efforts to enlist all Americans -individuals, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, corporations and foundations - as partners in solving our great challenges. Located within the Domestic Policy Council, it will:

• Catalyze partnerships between the government and nonprofits, businesses and philanthropists in order to make progress on the President's policy agenda
• Identify and support the rigorous evaluation and scaling of innovative, promising ideas that are transforming communities like, for example, Harlem Children's Zone, YouthVillages, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Citizen Schools.
• Support greater civic participation through new media tools.
• Promote national service.

I was very excited to see this shift, for a number of reasons.

First, while they're related, service and social entrepreneurship are different. I was actually pretty nervous when early reports seemed to suggest that it was the Office of Social Innovation's job to promote service. It's not that that isn't an important goal, but there is a real risk with these new offices that the full spectrum of aspiration of the nonprofit sector is lumped on, diluting the new staffers ability to achieve clear, distinct, value-added goals.

This language makes it far more coherent. And I do think that there's good rationale for having these two goals - expanding a culture of national community service and scaling up social innovation with a proven track record - be a part of the same office.

Government has the ability to inspire and incubate a particular vision of patriotism and right now people are hungry for opportunities to meaningfully serve their communities and country. At the same time, making the specific connection between that local service work and a pathway to scaling innovation around the country and perhaps even into policy would seem to me to have immense resonant power to inspire a new generation of changemakers.

There are very real questions of where the Social Innovation Fund can add value, which I hope to explore in the next couple days. But regardless, I'm glad to see this language evolution.