Your post is quite timely!

I also believe you have accurately illustrated your concerns about the Social Innovation Fund. I agree with everything you have said here. It is good to see that (finally) a Presidential Administration is at least giving philanthropic, non-profit causes their deserved attention. But alas, upon examining the facts more closely, this is still almost little more than lip-service. Much more needs to be done.

In my opinion, the biggest concerns are:

1) NOT ENOUGH FUNDING IS BEING OFFERED! $50 million, maybe incrementally increased to $100 million? Seriously, they need to do better than that. All things considered, that is a rather paltry amount, and – not to be too pessimistic – unlikely to to make a significant, lasting impact.

2) Perhaps more importantly, THESE FUNDS WILL CERTAINLY NOT GO TO THOSE ORGANIZATIONS WHO NEED IT MOST! In order to make the most impact, the wealth needs to be dispersed better to more of the lesser-known community-based organizations (many of whom arguably just as much, if not more, of an impact and are doing great work). The more organizations that are involved and enabled toward the non-profit cause, the better off society will be.

Of course, Jasmine, you do bring up a very excellent point, about the maintenance of certain evaluation standards. Of course, the White House is going to want to cover its back, and not foolishly give money out to anyone. Obviously, stricter standards mean that much of this funding will end up in the hands of the larger, more well-known organizations. This is the nature of the beast, unfortunately. Certainly, something can be done about this.

Pablo Eisenberg, in a blogpost to onphilanthropy.com (http://tiny.cc/f5ynt) gives some pretty interesting ideas, such as perhaps lobbying congress to increase the five percent minimal payout that foundations are required to distribute annually – and making sure these payouts are all in the form of grants. According to Eisenberg, under current law, foundations can include all their management costs as part of their minimal payout.

As all students and practitioners of policy know, change in the Republic of the United States of America was intended to be, and is, slow. Such is the business of government!

I think you hit the nail on the head. There is an additional dimension so to speak to the issue, the barriers or costs to influence. There are some groups which due to their size, lack of capital and organization etc. are unable to exert a significant amount of influence. Students are a good example, they have a huge stake in what happens, and are usually one of the largest stakeholders, but rarely exert significant influence because they cannot organize for a variety of different reasons. So basically the political power influences the organizational behavior, but costs/barriers to power influence the amount of political power any particular group holds. The question is how to we accurately conceptualize and measure these relationships?

In some ways when you speak about the continuum I wonder if there’s almost another component to your model, both external/internal, potential influence and then the supply side factors that impact the ability of constituents to influence these organizations. I think back to Ben-Ner’s stakeholder theory and Steinberg’s failure theory in the nonprofit Bible. In both of these ‘theories’ they talk about the COSTS to collective action but ultimately I think these same elements could be applied to the COSTS to potential influence.

For example, in many universities even when tuition is raised for all students, you basically see student protests, and some media hits, but you don’t see a ton of other action/influence.

Do you think these COSTS to collective action, access, entry have some impact on influence?