Children’s perspectives…
What Is Missing In Pay-For-Success In Children’s Services?
Paul Neitman, LMSW – Open Minds
The advent of pay-for-performance initiatives, such as social impact bonds (SIB), has given many in the children’s services field opportunities for innovation that, from my perspective, have been lacking. This was the focus of the recent article by my colleague Howard Shiffman, The Shifting Target For Pay-For-Success – Child Services.
An important piece of that article that caught my attention was the reference to the analysis, Social Impact Bonds: Lessons Learned So Far, work from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The analysis confirmed what many of us know – that many organizations in the non-profit world lack the capacity to meet the provider requirements necessary to successfully implement a SIB initiative.
Based on my knowledge of the capacity of many non-profit children’s organizations today, my review of some of the SIB projects, and having written a SIB request-for-information (RFI) response for a children’s services initiative, I have some “on the ground” perspectives on the use of SIBs in children’s service.