Social Innovation Fund Invests in ICS to Support Early Childhood Outcomes

COLUMBIA, SC – ICS was awarded with a grant of more than $780,000 to support early childhood outcomes. The grant, provided by the Corporation for National and Community Service’ s (CNCS) Social Innovation Fund (SIF), aims to advance and evaluate emerging funding models that align payment for services with verified outcomes, an approach known as Pay for Success (PFS).

ICS has been working on improving early childhood outcomes through Pay for Success financing for some time. In 2014, ICS organized the first national conference on PFS for early childhood with the business organization ReadyNation. ICS also conducted a 9-month PFS feasibility study on the Nurse-Family Partnership, which enabled South Carolina to move smoothly into PFS transaction structuring and should result in a significant new investment for services to nearly 4,000 families in need. The grant announced today will allow ICS to expand that work to help jurisdictions from across the United States to use Pay for Success financing to improve outcomes for young children and their families.

ICS Vice President, Joe Waters, said: “We expect this investment by the Social Innovation Fund will catapult early childhood Pay for Success forward, resulting in numerous transactions for diverse early childhood programs. These transactions will result in more effective early childhood systems that can operate at scale to improve childhood outcomes, while also improving government, funder, and provider capacity to track and manage those outcomes. Our nation’s children, families, and communities will benefit.”