In July 2010, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation was selected as one of 11 inaugural intermediary organizations of the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a new federal initiative that uses private intermediaries to support the expansion of innovative, transformative social programs proven to promote economic opportunity, healthy lives, and youth development.  The role of an intermediary is to identify such programs and award to them grants consisting of federal funds that the intermediary matches. (For more information, see the website of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which administers the SIF.)

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation believes the Social Innovation Fund has the potential to become a catalyst for scaling "what works” by encouraging the public sector and the nonprofit capital markets to direct more resources to the most promising and effective solutions to some of our nation’s seemingly intractable social problems.

EMCF created the True North Fund to leverage its role as a Social Innovation Fund intermediary. By adding the resources of institutional and individual philanthropic co-investors to those of EMCF and the Social Innovation Fund, we hope to expand the pool and the reach of effective, evidence-based programs that improve the life prospects of low-income youth. The success of our participation in the SIF will be measured by the greater numbers of young people whose lives are transformed by more effective youth-serving organizations. 

As an intermediary of the Social Innovation Fund, EMCF was charged with granting $20 million ($10 million of federal SIF funds, matched by $10 million from EMCF's private resources) to "increase the scale of community-based solutions that have evidence of real impact." EMCF's SIF grants are designed to build the evidence base and organizational capacity of a select cadre of nonprofits so they can, within three years,

1. Significantly increase the numbers of youth served by effective programs, and
2. Substantially advance the evidence of their effectiveness with rigorous, independent evaluations that demonstrate positive outcomes.

Our objective: a diverse, balanced portfolio of youth-serving organizations with the potential to make a transformative impact on the way we help economically disadvantaged young people become successful, productive, independent adults.

All monies from the Social Innovation Fund will directly benefit grantees, supporting infrastructure development, capacity building and evaluation. All SIF-related administrative costs for EMCF and our collaborators, MDRC and Bridgespan, will be borne by EMCF. EMCF will also cover the costs of Bridgespan’s planning and capacity-building support to grantees.

EMCF’s participation in the SIF is above and beyond our normal grantmaking activity. The grants we are making with the $10 million awarded by the SIF, as well as our own $10 million in matching funds, will be over and above the grantmaking we do to meet the payout of 5 percent of endowment that private foundations are required to make yearly.

A summary of EMCF's selection process, which started with an open call for applications on September 29, 2010, can be found here: A Summary of EMCF's 2010-2011 Selection of SIF Grantees.(A description of all 225 organizations that submitted an application can be found here.)

Our complete SIF application,  including comments made by external reviewers used by the Corporation for National and Community Service (which administers the SIF) to assess applicants, is available on the Corporation's website.